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The Speed of Sight
From: "Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:44:11 -0400
very OT, but still cool (well not for the guinea pig ;-) from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9633-calculating-the-speed-of-sight.html Each of your eyes transfers information to your brain at about the same speed as a fast Ethernet connection, US researchers have calculated. That might sound impressive, but the scientists say that our neurons could move data a lot faster than that. The fact that they do not suggests that our nervous system is trading off speed against energy-efficiency. The researchers, based at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, US, attached a guinea pig retina to an array of electrodes, while sustaining it in a nutrient-rich soup. They projected a number of images onto the retina, and recorded the patterns of electrical firing in the retina's ganglion cells. These cells feed information down the optic nerve, towards the brain's visual cortex.
From these recordings, the researchers calculated that a guinea pig
retina transfers data at about 875 kilobits per second. Human retinas have about ten times as many ganglion cells, giving a "bandwidth" of 8.75 megabits per second. ---------------------------------------------------- -JP<who was sure his retina was at least GigE> _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
Current thread:
- The Speed of Sight Dude VanWinkle (Jul 28)
- Re: The Speed of Sight Andrew (Jul 28)