The Retina
eBook - ePub

The Retina

An Approachable Part of the Brain, Revised Edition

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

The Retina

An Approachable Part of the Brain, Revised Edition

About this book

John Dowling's The Retina, published in 1987, quickly became the most widely recognized introduction to the structure and function of retinal cells. In this Revised Edition, Dowling draws on twenty-five years of new research to produce an interdisciplinary synthesis focused on how retinal function contributes to our understanding of brain mechanisms.

The retina is a part of the brain pushed out into the eye during development. It retains many characteristics of other brain regions and hence has yielded significant insights on brain mechanisms. Visual processing begins there as a result of neuronal interactions in two synaptic layers that initiate an analysis of space, color, and movement. In humans, visual signals from 126 million photoreceptors funnel down to one million ganglion cells that convey at least a dozen representations of a visual scene to higher brain regions.

The Revised Edition calls attention to general principles applicable to all vertebrate retinas, while showing how the visual needs of different animals are reflected in their retinal variations. It includes completely new chapters on color vision and retinal degenerations and genetics, as well as sections on retinal development and visual pigment biochemistry, and presents the latest knowledge and theories on how the retina is organized anatomically, physiologically, and pharmacologically.

The clarity of writing and illustration that made The Retina a book of choice for a quarter century among graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, vision researchers, and teachers of upper-level courses on vision is retained in Dowling's new easy-to-read Revised Edition.

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Yes, you can access The Retina by John E. Dowling in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Cognitive Science. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Copyright
  4. Dedication
  5. Contents
  6. Preface to the Revised Edition
  7. Preface (1987)
  8. 1 Approaches to the Brain
  9. 2 Retinal Cells and Information Processing
  10. 3 Wiring of the Retina
  11. 4 Neuronal Responses
  12. 5 Synaptic Mechanisms and Chemistry
  13. 6 Photoreceptor Mechanisms and Visual Adaptation
  14. 7 Color Vision
  15. 8 Retinal Degenerations, Electroretinography, and Genetics
  16. 9 Retinal and Brain Mechanisms
  17. References
  18. Index