Peeking between memory and perception
The human field of vision is only about 180 degrees, so if you’re reading this at your desk, you should have a good view of the stuff that’s right in front of you — your computer and phone, maybe some pictures of your family. Despite that limited view, your brain is able to stitch together a coherent 360-degree panorama of the world around you, and now researchers are beginning to understand how. Harvard scientists have pinpointed two regions in the brain’s so-called scene network — the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) and the occipital place area (OPA) — and demonstrated that they share nearly identical patterns of neural activation when people are shown images of what is in front of and behind them. The finding suggests that these regions play a key role in helping humans understand their visual environment. The study is described in an Aug. 26 paper in Current Biology. “We have a...