Samual Solomon School of Medical Sciences, University of Sydney What does the eye tell the brain? Wednesday 27th August 14:05-14:55pm, Eastern Avenue Lecture Theatre. This is an old question, but still unanswered. To gain some insight we have been measuring the responses of nerve cells early in the visual pathway, in the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus. The two major pathways from retina to visual cortex are segregated at the level of the LGN and we have exploited this to measure the responses of cells in each pathway. The basic visual stimulus consists a 16x16 grid of pixels, where the intensity of each pixel is drawn from a Gaussian distribution and updated randomly every 30 ms. We would like to use the response to this stimulus to determine what information the LGN provides to visual cortex, and whether the different pathways provide information about different aspects of the stimulus. In this seminar I will introduce the theme and some of our results, as well as our preliminary analyses using an optimal linear decoder.