
Scientists bring new insight into how animals see - dnetesn
https://phys.org/news/2019-01-scientists-insight-animals.html
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skosch
Article:
[https://www.pnas.org/content/115/50/E11817](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/50/E11817)

Awful headline. This isn't about "how does my dog see the world", but about an
energy-preservation mechanism in the retina.

They found that when it's dark out, the neurons in the optical nerve fire less
frequently, effectively reducing the bandwidth of information because most of
it is noise anyway, and that this regulation is based on the signal of ambient
light receptors [0] (which make up only about 1%, compared to rods and cones),
which the authors chemically stimulated to confirm the hypothesis.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrinsically_photosensitive_retinal_ganglion_cells)

