Dr Simon Laughlin

Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge
Email: s.laughlin@zoo.cam.ac.uk
Web: click here

Research Interests: By virtue of their adaptability, eyes and brains are remarkably plastic organs. This plasticity has enabled the evolution of an astonishingly wide range of behavioural patterns. What forms does adaptation take, and how has adaptability determined the design and evolution of nervous systems? My interest started with a well known form of adaptation, an eye’s rapid adjustment to changes in light level. My finding that adaptation adjusts neural processing to optimise the flow of information from eye to brain led to a broader question. How are sense organs, neural membranes, neural circuits and neural codes adapted to optimise function, and what are the relevant constraints?

Insect compound eyes offer a remarkable opportunity to examine this broad topic, without sacrificing the depth required to obtain unambiguous answers. The simplicity and diversity of compound eyes allow us to relate function to behaviour, ecology and phylogeny. We use exacting physiological techniques to describe and measure the flow of information through neurons, develop models that optimise processing within ecological and cellular constraints, and identify those properties of neurons and neural codes that determine performance. We are applying this approach to eye design, receptor mechanisms and to higher order visual processes, such as motion detection. A recent breakthrough, the first measurements of the metabolic cost of sensory and neural information, permit a cost-benefit approach to evolution and design that is widely applicable to sensory ecology, neural coding, brain evolution, and cell signalling.