How our eyes process danger and emotions

Melbourne: Humans have the best of all possible visual worlds because our full stereo vision, generating 3D pictures of its surroundings and enabling us to perform tasks like threading a needle, combines with primitive visual pathways to quickly spot danger, a new study has found.

The finding shows that in humans and other primates, information from the eyes is not only sent to the visual cortex for the complex processing that allows stereoscopic vision, but also could feed directly into deep brain circuits for attention and emotion.

"The brain cells that we identified suggest that human and other primates retain a visual pathway that traces back to the primitive systems of vertebrates like fish and frogs," said lead researcher Paul Martin from University of Sydney.