A few years ago, I remember watching part of a program about how the optic nerve processes the visual stimuli. They showed how some nerves activate on lines, others activate on intersections of lines, a third activate on boundaries (sharp transitions in the level of reflected light), another triggers on dots, etc.
They showed this by connecting the nerve to a speaker and scanning it over a small (~4") disc with a black and white pattern.
Does anybody else remember this program? I only watched a few minutes of it while flipping through channels. I’d like to have the source to cite from when explaining what I learned from it (assuming it hasn’t been debunked since).
This is not evidence of the optic nerve processing the data (it doesn’t). If the signals they were recording were coming from the optic nerve, it is evidence of processing that occurs in the retina. There have been lots, hundreds probably, maybe even thousands, of studies about retinal processing, going back as far as the 1930s I think (maybe even earlier), and still continuing today. It has since been shown that the retina does some much more sophisticated processing than the sort of stuff you mention. (IIRC, Barlow was one of the pioneers of this sort of research. I can’t offhand remember the other key names.) I doubt whether the program you saw was based on one particular experiment.
You may also be thinking of processing that goes on in the primary visual cortex, at the back of the brain. Are you sure the signals they were recording were not from there rather than from the optic nerve? In this case, the pioneering and most famous researchers in the field were the team of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel (working mostly with anesthetized cats, with electrodes stuck in their brains). They got the Nobel Prize for the work, which was done originally in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Again, they did lots of experimental studies, and so did plenty of other people, once they had shown the way. (And of course, as is always the case in science, Hubel and Wiesel were themselves building on earlier work in the same vein.)
That is clearly not what the OP is talking about (and it is very heavy on the hype). What that team is doing is technically very impressive, but in fact it does very little to advance our understanding of how vision actually works.
No, that’s not it. The in the clip I’m thinking of they’d show a sample pattern and you’d hear clicks (from a speaker) as the nerve activated by parts of the pattern as it scanned over them.
Hubel & Wiesel did related research, as njtt says. They got a Nobel in Medicine (1981) for it, same year as Sperry for split brains.
I’m not sure these are the best example videos, but you can search for more.
I am not certain if they did anything with the retina or optic nerve, but they did in LGN, and the receptive fields there are very similar to the retina’s. Long video with both sets of experiments.