Eyes Are 500 Million Years Old: Study shows older than our brain

tru_m.a.c

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Eyes don't exist without a central nervous system to process it


Eyes can't be called eyes if they are procesing images for some sort of "nerve network" as you are mentioning. In that case, then any piece of concave translucent material with a proportionally equidistand focus/foci can be considered an eye. That would be like saying the elbow came before the arm.

Would the jellyfish not fit the description by @The Real

The skyward gaze of one set of eyes belonging to box jellyfish provides evidence that these creatures -- which lack a conventional brain -- are capable of sophisticated behavior. New research has shown that one species of jellyfish uses one set of eyes to navigate and keep itself close to home.

"It is a surprise that a jellyfish -- an animal normally considered to be lacking both brain and advanced behavior -- is able to perform visually guided navigation, which is not a trivial behavioral task," said lead researcher Anders Garm of the University of Copenhagen. "This shows that the behavioral abilities of simple animals, like jellyfish, may be underestimated." [Image Gallery: Jellyfish Rule!]

Box jellyfish have 24 eyes of four different types, and two of them -- the upper and lower lens eyes -- can form images and resemble the eyes of vertebrates like humans. The other eyes are more primitive. It was already known that box jellyfish's vision allows them to perform simpler tasks, like responding to light and avoiding obstacles.
 

Mr. Somebody

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Vision is something crazy when you start thinking about it in depth. Even the fact that the light we absorb in our eyes to form that image is flipped upside down and our brains have to interpret it to make it look "right" to us. Even have cases where people are given special glasses to make the image they see inverted and they eventually adapt to the upside down image to go about learning how to re-do things like ride bikes, write, etc..
OMG are you sayin we're really upside down right now :mindblown:
 

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http://bcove.me/wybfvsw9

NOT many special powers need whiskers. But rats fitted with a prosthesis that allows them to "touch" infrared light are the first animals to acquire a sixth sense.

Miguel Nicolelis and colleagues at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, trained rats to run to a source of visible light. A sensor that can detect infrared, which mammals can't see, was connected to electrodes implanted in their somatosensory cortex, which processes touch sensations from their whiskers. When the prosthesis detects infrared, it sends signals to the electrodes, which grow stronger when the light source is close (Nature Communications, doi.org/kh4).

When the rats' sensor first picked up signals, the animals would stop and rub their whiskers, but they gradually realised that the sensation was coming from further away. After a month, the rats ran over to the infrared light in the dark, as they had to the visible light; the cortex had adapted to deal with input from both the whiskers and the infrared sensor.

"Instead of seeing, the rats learned how to touch the light," says Nicolelis. The finding could lead to new prostheses for people with damage to their visual cortex, he says.
 
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