Senses:

Eye Motion Tracking

Figure 1. Diagram of Eye.

The vast majority of people with impaired vision retain some functional vision to perform everyday tasks and are characterized as having low vision. The ability to track eye movement in individuals suffering from low vision may provide some insight into how some are better able to adapt to this disability than others.

This project utilizes correlation algorithms to track the movement of the vessels on the retina as a subject moves his/her eyes while performing a visual task. The images of the retina are from a scanning laser ophthalmoscope (SLO). There are three kinds of movements that are tracked: horizontal, vertical and rotational shift. The visual task utilizes a 5x5 grid of symbols. One symbol at a time is lit, starting at the upper right, and progresses across each row till the lower left one is lit. Subjects are asked to focus on the symbol that is currently lit as the SLO images their retina.

El Glaucoma:

1) ¿Qué es el glaucoma?
El glaucoma también denominado hipertensión intraocular es una enfermedad de los ojos que puede causar la pérdida de la visión. Ocurre como resultado de acumulación de líquido en el globo ocular. Imagínese que la parte de adentro de su ojo es como un lavamanos con la llave siempre abierta y el desagüe siempre abierto. Como el agua dentro del lavamanos, el líquido dentro de su ojo se mueve hacia adentro y hacia afuera. El líquido alimenta el ojo y lo mantiene saludable. Después de que el líquido circula éste se vacía a través de un desagüe en la parte frontal del ojo. En las personas con glaucoma el desagüe en el ojo está bloqueado y el líquido no puede salir del globo ocular. En cambio, el líquido se acumula y ocasiona un aumento de la presión en el ojo por lo general se presenta después de los 40 años, aunque existen diferentes tipos que pueden afectar a otras etapas de la vida
2) ¿Qué es el nervio óptico?
El nervio óptico está compuesto por más de un millón de fibras nerviosas, que conectan la retina al cerebro (vea el diagrama a continuación). La retina es el tejido sensible a la luz, situado en el fondo del ojo. Es necesario tener un nervio óptico saludable para tener buena visión.

3) ¿Cómo afecta el glaucoma del ángulo abierto al nervio óptico?
En la parte delantera del ojo existe un espacio llamado cámara anterior. Un líquido claro entra y sale continuamente de este espacio, alimentando los tejidos a su alrededor. El líquido sale de la cámara anterior a través del ángulo abierto donde se unen la córnea y el iris (vea el diagrama a continuación). Cuando el líquido llega al ángulo fluye a través de una red o malla esponjosa, parecida a un colador, y entonces sale del ojo.
A veces, cuando el líquido llega al ángulo, pasa muy lentamente a través de esta malla esponjosa. Al acumularse este líquido, la presión dentro del ojo aumenta hasta llegar a un nivel en que puede dañar al nervio óptico. Cuando el nervio óptico se daña por el aumento de la presión, puede causar glaucoma de ángulo abierto y alguna pérdida de visión. Por eso es importante controlar la presión dentro de los ojos.

EAR:

In darkness by day we must press on, giddy at the tilt of a negative crystal.
When a crystal tilts, it reveals another of its many facets, one perhaps hitherto invisible or overlooked. It reminds whoever views it how much the scrutiny of any one aspect depends on the occlusion of others, since there is no single vantage point to which the whole of the object is open. Prynne’s poems are characteristically crystalline, multi-faceted, in this sense. The least shift of phrase or word or tone will tend to dislodge and replace whatever meaning, or beginnings of meaning, that the reader had previously observed. Sustained reading of texts so unstable and elusive can induce a kind of vertigo, a sense indeed of pressing on through a disorientating darkness; the mind is never quite sure whether it can adjust rapidly enough to meet each fresh challenge, or how much it can afford to overlook in the interests of staying lucid. But the shifts and turns also bring moments of bright exhilaration, of tantalising and exasperating beauty. A configuration will flare up briefly among the swirl of possible paths to follow, or a moment of colloquial directness will suddenly invigorate lines which had seemed blurred. The strange power that this writing can generate — and nowhere more so than in The Oval Window (1983) — prompts a search for a way of responding to it that respects the continual surprise, the sense of naive or heedless fascination, that runs alongside the rigorousness of thinking which the complexities of the text seem to demand, for it is remarkable how the language manages to retain a mysterious freshness despite all the wear it suffers.

Fuctions of:
-Cerebral cortex. -Pons.
-Hyppocampus. -Cerebellum.
-Amigolala.
-Thalamus.



-Fuction of cerebral cortex:

-Determines Intelligence

-Determines Personality

-Interpretation of Sensory Impulses

-Motor Function

-Planning and Organization

-Touch Sensation

-Fuction of hyppocampus:
-There is mounting evidence for the first of these cognitive functions that the hippocampus performs which is associative representation: the encoding of "...associations among stimuli, actions, and places that compose discreet events." Functional neuroimaging studies have provided some evidence for this, however, they have also shown activation of the surrounding cortical regions - indicating that the cortex is also involved in this process of associating stimuli, albeit (perhaps) in a different manner. There has also been increasing evidence for the role of the hippocampus in learning the context of events. For example, in fear conditioning, it has been found that damage to the hippocampus results in a lack of contextual fear conditioning, without affecting the conditioned response.

-The second cognitive function proposed to be mediated by the hippocampus is sequential organisation, which is "...the organisation of an episode as a sequence of events that unfolds over time." This is evidenced by the fact that damage to the hippocampus impairs order memory, bu not recognition memory. Similarly, it has been shown that it is not the relative memory trace strengths which are use to determine temporal order - and it is suggested that sequence learning is "...mediated by declarative and non-declarative strategies involving distinct memory systems, and these forms of representation are independant."

-The third cognitive function is the linking of common features of disparate memory episode to create flexible representations. This is the consolidation (abstraction) of common features of different episodes into representations in their own right - the creation of semantic information from episodic memory. Further functional neuroimaging studies have shown that extensive cortical networks are activated in addition to the hippocampus when factual information is acquired. There is however a proposed difference in processing method for the two regions which facilitate this linking process: "...the hippocampus rapidly learns about individual experiences and prevents interference by separating representations of those experiences, whereas the cortex gradually extracts regularities over many experiences." This suggests a uniform underlying representation - although there would be differences based on the manner in which the memories are formed.

-Fuction of amygdala:
The amygdala are almond-shaped groups of neurons located deep within the medial temporal lobes of the brain in complex vertebrates, including humans. [2] Shown in research to perform a primary role in the processing and memory of emotional reactions, the amygdalae are considered part of the limbic system.

-Neurons:
-Neurons are electrically excitable cells in the nervous system that process and transmit information. Neurons are the core components of the brain, and spinal cord in vertebrates and ventral nerve cord in invertebrates, and peripheral nerves.

-Limbic system:
The limbic system is a term for a set of brain structures including the hippocampus and amygdala that support a variety of functions including emotion, behavior and long term memory. The structures of the brain described by the limbic system are closely associated with the olfactory structures.

-Fuction of Thalamus:
The thalamus is a pair and symmetric part of the brain. It constitutes the main part of the diencephalon.

-Diencephalon:
The diencephalon is the region of the brain that includes the thalamus, hypothalamus, epithalamus, prethalamus or subthalamus and pretectum. It is derived from the prosencephalon. The diencephalon is located at the midline of the brain, above the mesencephalon of the brain stem.

-Fuction of Pons:
-Arousal.
-Assists in Controlling Automatic Fuctions.
-Relays Sensory Information between Cerebrum and Cerebellum.
-Slepp.