Scientists shed new light on how the brain detects motion

If you’ve managed to avoid getting hit by a bus today, you should thank your brain, which is designed to detect motion in order to help us safely navigate the world around us. This ability is so vital for our survival as a species that we’ve even developed the capacity to detect “implied motion,” such as movement that is suggested in still photographs. Yet while most of us take this for granted, scientists have long struggled to understand the neural pathways that control this essential function.
Publishing their findings in the journal NeuroImage, a team of researchers from Dartmouth College have now shed new light on how the brain interprets motion, indicating that the two pathways involved in this process may be more integrated than previously thought. Additionally, their results suggest that motion is processed differently depending on whether the moving object is animate or inanimate.