Visual Neuroscience

Directors: Richard Kramer, UC Berkeley; and Tiffany Schmidt, Northwestern University

Course Description:

Vision is our most precious and important sense, with more than 50% of the cerebral cortex involved in processing information from our eyes. Vision is also the most widely studied sensory modality, with thousands of laboratories, domestic and international, seeking to understand normal visual function and vision disorders.

The goal of the Visual Neuroscience course is to solidify the learning of fundamental concepts about the neural processing of visual information from the retina to animal behavior while exposing trainees to multiple modern neuroscience techniques through hands-on experience.

Visual Neuroscience will span topics from molecular mechanisms of visual transduction to visual information processing in the retina and brain, to behavioral analysis of visual perception. The course will use a uniquely comparative approach, which will enable participants to use various animal systems, from invertebrates (cephalopods) to cold-blooded vertebrates (zebrafish), to mammals (mice). Hands-on work will take advantage of the sophisticated equipment available at the MBL to teach students how to carry out anatomical investigations using electron microscopy, electrophysiological studies using patch clamp or multielectrode arrays, and functional imaging using small molecule or genetically-encoded activity indicators and multiphoton microscopy, to behavioral studies.

Specific topics will include:

• Single-cell and population recording from retinal neurons
• In vivo imaging of visual brain areas
• Electron microscopy and connectomics
• Modern approaches to single-cell RNAsequencing
• Visual behavior testing
• Training in mouse, zebrafish, and octopus