Samantha Moore's new film

Samantha Moore, an artist I was lucky enough to work with around the time of The Eye's UK launch, is making a new short film about synaesthesia. An Eyeful of Sound even has its own blog.

Acute observation

Pablo Artal, a professor of optics at the University of Murcia, Spain, has neatly demonstrated the sheer oddness of superior vision – the kind of eyesight enjoyed by sharp-shooters and the character mentioned at the end of The Eye, chapter 4:

"An expert tool juggler in one of the great English needle factories, in a recent test of skill, performed one of the most delicate mechanical feats imaginable. He took a common sewing needle of medium size (length 1 5/8 inches) and drilled a hole through its entire length from eye to point – the opening being just large enough to admit the passage of a very fine hair. Another workman in a watch-factory of the United States drilled a hole through a hair of his beard and ran a fiber of silk through it."
Gould, GM & Pyle, WL. [1896] 1997. Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine. Seattle, WA. The World Wide School. Available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/747

Do the eyes of such people enjoy superior optics? Not according to Artal, whose study in IOVS (E. A. Villegas, E. Alcon, and P. Artal."Optical Quality of the Eye in Subjects with Normal and Excellent Visual Acuity", Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci.9, (2008)) revealed that people with superior vision have eyes that are as optically shoddy as everyone else's.

So what makes them different? Are their eyes richer in photoreceptors, are these light-detecting cells more evenly (or more precisely) spread? Is their vitreous humour simply clearer? Are their retinas wired more efficiently?

It looks as though Artal may have opened a small door onto a very big room...

Time for a little lie down...

Handedness in fish rarely gets more spectacular: an intermediary fossil shows how flatfish have evolved such spectacularly assymetrical faces.

Please God let there be a sane explanation of EMDR...

The British Psychological Society blog reminds me of one of the 1001 things I had to leave out of the book for reasons of space. An item I wasn't sorry to omit was this vexed business of eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy. Move your eyes from left to right and back again while recalling a traumatic event, and over time, the event ceases to be traumatic.
It works – but no-one quite knows how it works.
My gut feeling at the time was that this effect didn't have anything specifically to do with the eye or visual processing. While the jury's still out, a study by Raymond Gunter and Glen Bodner lends substance to my groundless prejudice.

The efficacy of touch

My book's discussion of how well blind people touch their way towards a vision of the world inevitably employed the example of Helen Keller. In retrospect, I should have gone to talk to Geerat Vermeij. "Blind since childhood and equipped with an acute sense of touch, Vermeij probably knows more about molluscs and their shells than anyone alive," says this short PBS profile.

Stephen Jay Gould went a lot further: he reckoned Vermeij could see things other scientists in his field couldn't!

Light sensors that control body clock are found in eye

I haven't had the chance to dig out the source material on this, but Wendy Hansen's article for the LA Times on June 14 summarises some new work on how the eye regulates our circadian rythms. The detection of previously unknown 'light sensors' in fully 2% of retinal cells is a pretty staggering claim, though it's hard from this brief news article to know exactly what the figure refers to.
Something to follow up.

The world's largest eye

The largest colossal squid ever seen turned up live and intact in a trawler's nets in February 2007. There was never any question that this beauty boasted the largest living eyes on the planet.

The Natural History went to press before the dissection took place, so for facts and figures, have a look at Allegra Stratton's piece for the Guardian. Steve O'Shea (left) is leading the mammoth examination, and you can follow his progress on this blog from the Te Papa museum in New Zealand.

Meanwhile, Dan-Eric Nilsson (who co-wrote Animal Eyes with Michael Land – a hugely valuable source for my own effort) gets his hands dirty in this podcast lecture about deep-sea eyes.

Autism and eye tracking

There's little in current version of The Natural History about how the eye is used to diagnose medical conditions, so this blogpost from about.com caught my attention.

The project – attempting to diagnose a risk of autism in infants only nine months old – has been generating a few too many headlines for its own good, but Lisa Jo Rudy's article usefully sorts the wheat from the chaff.

Eye tracking leaves the lab – in a big way

Michael Land pioneered the study of eye movements in real-world situations: now Andreas Bulling, a doctoral student at the Wearable Computing Lab of ETH Zurich, takes the technology a step further with these dinky spectacles.

Advances in MRI capture thinking

This from James Randerson at the Guardian:

Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.

The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.

A Flashy Affair

March 6 2008: Caroline Ash of Science magazine reports new findings about chameleons. It seems that their skin-colour changes are often more to do with communication than camouflage.

"Humans see chameleons as masters of camouflage. The lizards themselves seem to see more in it than predator avoidance. This family of lizards has evolved a range of talents, some merely changing skin tone, others changing color, too. All thanks to rapidly reacting neurally controlled chromatophores in their skin. Stuart-Fox and Moussalli used reflectance spectroradiometry, tuned to the spectral sensitivities of the retinas of chameleons and of potential bird predators, to measure the conspicuousness of a variety of lineages of African dwarf chameleons in their preferred habitats. If the habitat is dense and complex, bird predators tend to be excluded, and there is less need for disguise. Here, the chameleons indulge in flashy aggressive behavior, changing color spectacularly in social displays; at least from a chameleon's-eye view. In more open, hotter habitats it pays to live a drab and quiet life, avoiding the notice of predators, staying cool sand-colored and merely adjusting brightness during social exchanges. So, deep in the bush, what we perceive as subtly changing camouflage, chameleons perceive as flamboyant social signaling."

PLoS Biol. 6, e25, 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060025 (2008).