Dr. Jennifer Groh

I learned about a study showing that, and I'm going to begin with the neuroscience nerdy lingo and then we'll unpack it, that there is a brain structure called the superior colliculus that's responsive to both visual and auditory stimuli and that the responses to auditory stimuli depended on where the eyes were looking.

If you move the eyes, the neurons' receptive field, the region in space where they were responsive to, would shift as the eyes moved.

And that blew my mind.

I could not get that out of my head.

And it kind of set me on the track that I've been on ever since then.

One of the things that was really interesting to me about it is that figuring out where a sound is with respect to where the eyes are looking is something that would be easy for us to do with a pencil and paper.

It's very simple math.

If you know that the sound is located, say, 10 degrees to the right and your eyes are

looking 10 degrees to the left and that tells you that the sound is 20 degrees to the right of where your eyes are, really not that hard to do.

But from what I knew at that point about how the brain represents this kind of spatial information, it seemed a big puzzle for how the brain might actually create these kind of moving representations of where the sound is located.

They move quite a lot.

Exactly.

And mostly we're not aware of this, right?

But if you think about it, every time your eyes move, the visual scene is shifting massively on the retina.

But we don't even notice this.

And this is an indication that the brain is doing a ton of computation under the hood to give us that perceptual experience.

Because if we were just representing reality, the reality would be these massively shifting, smeared visual scenes.

Gosh, I wish we knew where conscious awareness was.

I think that's an open question.

And the superior colliculus is important in this story because that's where the research began.