ERC Starting Grant: The Retinae as Windows to the Brain

Several sophisticated image processing circuits have been discovered in the animal retina, many of which manifest massive neural synchrony. A major insight is that this type of synchrony often translates to high-frequency activity on a macroscopic level, but electroretinography (ERG) has not been tapped to examine this potential in humans. Bolstered by our compelling results combining ERG with magnetoencephalography (MEG), this project will address several open questions with respect to human visual processing.

Characterizing retinocortical interaction represents a complete paradigm shift that will be imperative for our understanding of neural synchrony in the human nervous system and enable several groundbreaking new avenues for research.