The Speed of Sight

["Dude VanWinkle" <dudevanwinkle () gmail com>]

very OT, but still cool (well not for the guinea pig ;-)

from: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9633-calculating-the-speed-of-sight.html

Each of your eyes transfers information to your brain at about the
same speed as a fast Ethernet connection, US researchers have
calculated.

That might sound impressive, but the scientists say that our neurons
could move data a lot faster than that. The fact that they do not
suggests that our nervous system is trading off speed against
energy-efficiency.

The researchers, based at the University of Pennsylvania in
Philadelphia, US, attached a guinea pig retina to an array of
electrodes, while sustaining it in a nutrient-rich soup. They
projected a number of images onto the retina, and recorded the
patterns of electrical firing in the retina's ganglion cells. These
cells feed information down the optic nerve, towards the brain's
visual cortex.

> From these recordings, the researchers calculated that a guinea pig
retina transfers data at about 875 kilobits per second. Human retinas
have about ten times as many ganglion cells, giving a "bandwidth" of
8.75 megabits per second.

----------------------------------------------------

-JP<who was sure his retina was at least GigE>
_______________________________________________
Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts.
https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec
Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.