I’m the most recent member of the insect vision lab and as such, I would like to introduce myself. I’m Kai, and I’m a student at Flinders University studying mathematics, and a little bit of physics. Broadly speaking, I’m interested in the intersection of physics and biology, and with a number of pop-sci books having been released throughout the last <10 years extolling the relatively new integral science of “Quantum Biology,” it seems like I may be in for a ride in terms of where my interests will lead me (assuming such effort on my behalf is sufficiently reified).
Thus, my journey has led me to Karin and Joseph, who have welcomed me into the lab. With very little programming experience behind me, Joseph has been kind enough to thoroughly elucidate his way to situating me on the path of “Signal Processing.”
In essence, we would like to stimulate a hoverfly by presenting a set of visual stimuli with intensity modulated at varying frequencies, record the resulting electrical activity in a particular neuron (which is of course selected in the most lay-friendly, jargon-less way), and assess the resulting data with the intention of extracting out the original frequency of our stimulus. This will then be indicative of what the neuron of choice is doing when presented with such stimuli: is it summing the frequencies? selecting one? selecting one, and then another?
The field of insect vision is a deep and narrow pool to jump into for someone with no prior knowledge of it, but I’m lucky to be here, and most importantly, I’m learning something about how biological systems exploit the phenomenon of electricity.