Transverse Section of the Head from the “Body” Illustrations 2 series by Wataru Yoshida.
Light shines onto your retina, the signals are translated into electrical impulses that travel through the optic nerve, past the intersecting optic chiasm where the signal joins those of the other eye through the optic tract. It arrives at the lateral geniculate nuclei and enter the striate visual cortex through the optic radiations to have the details of what you have seen translated into information it can process. A reorganization and interpretation of that information follows, sending the messages forward dorsally and ventrally to understand both the “where” and the “what” embedded in the information; signals are also sent to other processing centres to integrate the visual signals. Only then can that information become useful to us.
