Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky/STAT

by Jaclyn Jeffrey-Wilensky

“What we see often determines how we act: We hit the brakes if a car is stopped ahead of us. We duck to avoid a low-hanging tree branch. We bend down to tie our shoe when the laces come undone.

“We rarely give these actions a second thought. But Mriganka Sur, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, is obsessed with them.

“’How is vision, which we do effortlessly, transformed into action, which requires volition, which requires attention and engagement?’ Sur asked. ‘How this transformation takes place is a fundamental question that is at the heart of brain function and behavior.’”

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