[Verse 1] In your retina's dark cathedral, rods are scattered thick One hundred twenty million strong, they catch the dimmest flick But cones are precious jewels, just six million bright They paint the world in color when there's plenty of light These photoreceptors dance, converting rays to code Before they pass their message down the neural road [Chorus] One-twenty million rods for darkness, six million cones for hue Ganglion cells compress it down to one point five million through The optic nerve's thin cable carries one megabit per second From eye to brain the data streams, reality's been reckoned [Verse 2] Retinal ganglion cells collect this massive flood Fifteen to twenty different types sort through the visual mud They squeeze all that information through a bottleneck so tight One million axons bundled up to carry sound and sight The optic nerve's bandwidth is surprisingly lean Just one megabit streaming through this biological machine [Chorus] One-twenty million rods for darkness, six million cones for hue Ganglion cells compress it down to one point five million through The optic nerve's thin cable carries one megabit per second From eye to brain the data streams, reality's been reckoned [Verse 3] The LGN receives this flood with matching neuron count One million relay stations that control the data's route But here's the shocking twist that neuroscience has found Just five to ten percent from retina comes inbound The rest is feedback, context, memory's embrace The brain talks to itself while building visual space [Verse 4] Your visual cortex layers stack like city floors Each one extracts new features from the data that it stores Simple cells find edges, complex cells track motion While hypercomplex neurons fuel the visual devotion Parallel pathways split the stream in fascinating ways The "what" and "where" of vision through distinct neural arrays [Bridge] V1 explodes the signal wide One hundred fifty million neurons on each side Could reach two-eighty million strong Processing edges, motion, getting nothing wrong Thirty areas in the cortex vie Half the primate brain just to see with one eye [Chorus] One-twenty million rods for darkness, six million cones for hue Ganglion cells compress it down to one point five million through From sparse to dense to distributed, the visual pathway flows How your brain constructs the world, now everybody knows [Chorus] One-twenty million rods for darkness, six million cones for hue Ganglion cells compress it down to one point five million through The optic nerve's thin cable carries one megabit per second From eye to brain the data streams, reality's been reckoned [Outro] From photons hitting retina to cortex painting scenes The numbers tell the story of our visual processing dreams
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