Go back to your first memories. You will definitely remember your early childhood. Perhaps when you were three years old, you will remember blurry images or strange feelings associated with certain places such as the garden of the house or the kitchen. Now think back some more, what do you remember before you were born? No doubt you were in complete darkness, not only were you closed in your womb, but your eyes were also closed, your whole visual apparatus was still under construction.
What if there was neural activity in the nerves of your eyes, would you have the experience of looking? We now know that even in
Does the retina have waves
Of course, researchers haven't done enough neuroscience experiments to know what a newborn baby sees. But since the 1980s, neuroscientists have discovered that the retina of some animals' eyes have been subjected to some activity before the animal opens its eyes. By studying many other species, neuroscientists were able to create a solid understanding of the patterns of neural activities that occur in an animal's eyes before it sees, which can include us humans as well because the developmental processes that regulate the response of the retina to light are similar in human and other non-human fetuses, in The reality is generally similar in mammals and vertebrates. So the retinal patterns found in other creatures are very similar to those found in humans
These patterns are known as retinal waves, and in physical terms they are the same natural activity generated by the process of light passing on the retina
Amazing discovery
Italian neuroscientists first discovered the activity that occurs in the retina before the youngster opens his eyes and that was in the late 1980s, but the actual study took place in subsequent decades in the United States led by researcher Rachel Wong, of the University of Washington, Carla Schatz of Stanford University, and Marla Villier of University of California at Beckerley. What Wong, Schatz, Feller and their colleagues did was a state-of-the-art imaging system that could give a picture of retinal patterns as they occurred—it wouldn't be easy, since the study sample is living tissue that lives inside the eyes of one creature that lives inside another
All of the vertebrates tested, including monkeys, chickens, turtles, mice, rabbits, rodents, cats, and even fish, had similar retinal activity patterns. Often this activity begins several days or weeks before the time the child opens his eyes. The actual timing varies, for example, some animals open their eyes at birth and others do not open their eyes until a few days after birth, but the basic pattern is completely similar in all species.
This activity how does it look? Since mice and rodents open their eyes a few weeks after birth, they have provided us with valuable information about retinal waves
Do waves have benefits
The retinal waves that we've found in all the vertebrates we've tested so far are a very useful (and actually important) evolutionary trait, but what do we make of them?
The main purpose of retinal waves is to regulate brain development. They are important for building correct connections between the eye and a part of the brain called the thalamus, which is the backbone of the brain. Nerve fibers that emerge from the eyes stimulate neurons in the thalamus and thus form intertwining lines through which one of the eyes feeds. When the retinal waves are blocked in one eye, the lines connected to it become very fine, while the lines connected to the other eye develop normally
. It is worth noting that the developmental processes depend in their development on the balance of automatic activities between the eyes in order to build the complex links that are important for the development of our ability to see. If the retina is inactive, the correct links will not be built. But retinal waves can contribute a lot, not only to building connections that help the brain develop properly. In simulation studies by computational neuroscientist Mark Albert and his colleagues, they found that retinal waves can give us a glimpse into the shapes and motions we saw when we first opened our eyes
Retinal wave patterns are spontaneous patterns, regulated by complex chemical reactions, but during development these reactions self-regulate into a relatively simple pattern. We can also imagine another scenario where chemical reactions cause the patterns to become random like black and white on TV screens, or monochromatic flicker, but that's not what it looks like, the waves erupt anyway, they move smoothly in a part of the retina and then fade away, and the process repeats, producing waves Coherent cells travel through part of the retina and over time cover the entire retina
Retinal waves do not look exactly like the world we see, but they have some properties similar to it, for example there are regions in them surrounded by boundaries such as the things that determine what we see in our world. As demonstrated by Albert et al., the basic statistical properties of the boundaries in a grating wave film are similar to those found in our world. Recent studies by researchers from Yale University indicated that retinal waves may give us motion patterns that correspond to the dimensions of the interference of what we see, that is, the flow of what we see in the visible world.
Albert called retinal waves as “innate learning,” a pre-training system that gives us experience that helps us understand what we will see next. So do babies who are about to be born see retinal waves? We will never know the answer
The vision system in the fetus is still under construction and the waves of the retina contribute to its creation as I mentioned earlier. Retinal waves in both eyes are generated independently, so they can be difficult to see together. Apart from this we also cannot know what is going on in the minds because they are peculiarities that occur in the mind, and this applies to adults as well, except that the adult can at least express what he has gone through
Delightful retinal waves
If we come to the topic of what we were seeing before we were born, I would say what we were seeing may look like retinal waves, and regardless of whether the fetus sees them or not, seeing these waves can be exhilarating for adults, especially when we know them, for me the wave pattern seems comfortable and meditative And most importantly, it is a miracle of wonders