Japanese street performer mimes violation of Hering's Law
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Mime artists often use movement to imply the breaking of physical laws: suitcases levitate, air becomes as impermeable as glass. We present the simulated (and actual) violation of a physiologic principle, Hering's Law of Equal Innervation.
To provide stereopsis while avoiding double vision, the movements of forward-facing primate eyes must be closely coordinated. In a 19th-century debate, Helmholtz contended that this coordination is a learned process, taming naturally independent eyes. Hering, meanwhile, believed the eyes to be inherently reined to each other and driven by a single control signal.1 Hering's view predominated and this final common pathway for horizontal eye movement came to be accepted as a unilateral signal to the abducens nucleus. This directly controls the lateral rectus of the ipsilateral, abducting, eye but also necessarily adducts the other eye, via interneurons to the contralateral oculomotor nucleus.
More recent neurophysiologic evidence, however, indicates that primate saccadic commands can be encoded monocularly,2 in common with the laterally mounted, independently moving eyes of our distant evolutionary forebears. Binocular coordination might therefore not arise as a necessary consequence of neuroanatomic connectivity. If so, it might be possible to execute voluntary monocular saccades. We present a case of a …
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