Almost nothing in the world is still. Toddlers dash across the living room. Cars zip across the street. Motion is one of the most important features in the environment; the ability to predict the movement of objects in the world is often directly related to survival – whether it’s a gazelle detecting the slow creep of a lion or a driver merging across four lanes of traffic.
Motion is so important that the primate brain evolved a dedicated system for processing visual movement, known as the middle temporal cortex, over 50 million years ago. This region of the brain contains neurons specialized for detecting moving objects. These motion detectors compute the information needed to track objects as they continuously change their location over time, then sends signals about the moving world to other regions of the brain, such as those involved in planning muscle movements.
