New research from Penn’s School of Medicine has opened up a clearer understanding of how the human eye communicates with the brain.
While earlier studies on vision have focused on what kind of information is sent from eye to brain, the Penn team instead wondered how fast and how much of that information is transmitted.
By studying an intact retina, the team found “spikes” of electrical impulses to the retina transmit data at 10 million bits per second—a speed that rivals computer connections of 10 to 100 million bits per second.