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Special senses: the eye and visual pathways

Published on May 28, 2026   27 min

A selection of talks on Neurology

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0:00
Welcome, everyone, to this talk on the special senses, focusing on vision. I am John Dowling, Gordon and Llura Gund, Professor of Neurosciences, Emeritus, in the department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the United States.
0:22
Let me start by emphasizing that we humans have five major senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. It is important, first of all, to recognize that without our senses, we would be isolated from one another and the world we live in. Thus, our senses are critical to us and to every animal. Vision is usually viewed as the most important of our senses. Indeed, polls consistently indicate that most people fear blindness more than any other sensory defect.
1:02
Our topic today is the eye and visual pathways. Vision starts in the eye, where light is detected. Then patterns of light and dark images, if you will, are analyzed first in the eye itself and then in various parts of the brain to allow us to see and recognize the visual world in which we exist. The slide shows the initial pathways of vision. From the eye, visual information goes to a relay station in the midbrain the lateral geniculate nucleus. Then to the cortex of the brain where visual information is further analyzed to enable us to recognize images including very complex ones, such as faces. Let us begin by discussing what happens in the eye, which contains much more than an array of photoreceptors.

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Special senses: the eye and visual pathways

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