Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute researchers hope one day to develop implants that make it possible for people to see without an optic nerve, by stimulating a part of the brain called the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN), which receives and processes visual information from the retina, via the optic nerve, before sending it on to the cerebral cortex.

The team recorded the responses of 49 individual neurons in a cat’s LGN while viewing complex moving artificial scenes and then compared the neural data to visual images recorded on a “catcam,” with the objective of developing and testing a software model of how the cat’s LGN responds to visual scenes.