MaxWell Webinar with Dr. Annalisa Bucci

The human brain constructs a seamless perception of the world despite the fact that visual signals travel along different pathways within the eye. In this webinar, I will present recent findings published in Nature Neuroscience revealing how, in the human fovea, a specialized retinal region responsible for high-acuity vision, different axonal conduction speeds compensate for differences in axonal length to synchronize the timing of visual signals. Using High-Density Microelectrode Arrays (HD-MEAs), we directly measured action potential propagation in thousands of human retinal ganglion cells, uncovering systematic variations in axonal speed that align with axon length. These electrophysiological results were integrated with anatomical modeling, imaging analyses, and human psychophysics to demonstrate a mechanism that ensures temporal precision in vision. Together, these approaches show how the retina itself contributes to the synchronization of perception, highlighting the power of HD-MEAs and complementary technologies to explore neural computation at subcellular resolution.