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Last updated: 26 May 2011
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How do we see? My work, studying the mechanisms of visual perception in the human brain in collaboration with A/Prof Justin Harris, Prof Colin Clifford and Dr Ehsan Arabzadeh, is helping find some answers to this question.
Billions of neurons in the brain interact together, like dancers, to effortlessly create perception of visual stimuli. Exactly how neurons interact to create perception of visual stimuli is not well understood.
To gain insights into workings of neuronal populations I use transcranial magnetic stimulation of the human brain. This method allows navigating to a specific area in the brain using volunteers’ brain images and stimulating the target area through the intact skull using a magnetic pulse.
The function of a stimulated brain area is usually briefly and reversibly disrupted which affects volunteers’ behavioural performance on the given visual task.
Changes in the behaviour as a result of magnetic stimulation allows us to gain insights into the neural interactions and mechanisms involved in the perception of visual stimuli.
I hope that in the future my work will also be useful to understand how neurons act together to create other perceptual processes such as hearing or touch.