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Swimming in the Deep End at the 2017 Gordon Research Conference for Eye Movement

dh2754
Jul 10, 2017
3 min read

I'm the kind of person who reads academic research for fun; my brain naturally craves to acquire and apply new material, all the time.

This, I think, is why I make a good consultant, but this trait can make it difficult to explain "What I do for a living" to other people...because I pretty much want to do everything :)

So when the Gordon Research Conference Series popped up one night when I was doing research, I registered at once. In fact, I registered for two optic-related research conferences. Looks like that trip to see Hawaii will be waiting another year--whoops!

However, this is not without its own tropical feeling, I suppose. I feel like I stepped into the 40-foot deep end of the pool, but I am certain there are some interesting insights to be gained and applied from this field, as we seek to apply these finding to the world of Virtual and Augmented reality, visual therapies, assistive devices, computer-brain interfaces, androids, avatars, and game environments, just to name a few ideas.

Fellow nerds, I encourage you to step out of your domain every now and then. Each field could greatly benefit from the findings of its fellow disciplines; that one little thread of discovery could be just the thing you've been seeking. A few observations and notes, thus far:

Of all the academians I've met, neuroscientists are the most generous in giving credit to the scientists who preceded them, and to their assistants and post-docs. It's really refreshing and sweet.
The visual response of parietal (motor) neurons is modulated by the position of the eye in its orbit.
Eye position is represented in the sensorimotor cortex (to be fair, I knew this already, but it leads to 4 below)
Oculomotor proprioception is necessary for spatial memory (this is very interesting to me, in the field of TBI, and points to the necessity of re-establishing this capability, post-injury)
In understood "dangerous" or stressful environments, the eye shows faster response times
In all cases, the eye moves faster towards good or "goal" objects
This to me implies that there is some larger detection system preceding the motor function of directing the eye to or from reward or punishment objects that does not require overt direction of gaze
Salience overrides the Hick-Hyman law
When testing memory, use non-verbalizable stimuli, for that may utilize a different (or additional) memory system. (Think abstract, geometrically complex Japanese crests instead of recognizable cartoon figures)
But where is "To be or not to be" stored in my brain? In my foggy memory (ha!) from my undergrad days, I remember this may go in the cortex and it gets deeper as the years wear on, but even so, how does that work, that they actually shift position, over time? And why does this occur?
Focal dystonia involves the basal ganglia, like Parkinson's, but dystonia is brought on by a dopamine deficit like Parkinson's is.
Parkinson's is not just about dopamine and the substantia nigra anymore. There are hypotheses floating around about the medial temporal lobe and seratonin, too.
If you have a Parkinson's patient walk across horizontal lines, they are able to lengthen their stride (this is pretty amazing, and makes me wonder if it's a depth perception issue, or some other visual processing issue)
In a Signal/Noise processing talk: "Signal= something we generally don't have control over."
But to counter that...more and more, I'm finding that the thalamus decides what the signal is, via its intermediate visual processing.