Ganglion Cells

How baseball pitchers hit the catcher’s glove every time is regulated by a motor control system which is paralleled by the retinal circuitry in our eyes. In the Asari and Meister paper, they were able to experimentally prove the functional role of amacrine cells in retinal dynamics. In this thought paper I will argue that together with the bipolar and ganglion cells, the amacrine cells operate in a parametric system similar to the feedback and feedforward systems found in motor control.
In order to determine the role of the amacrine cells they needed to determine the method of bipolar convergence and divergence in ganglion cells. When stimulated individually, two different bipolar cells were able to elicit distinct post synaptic potentials in the ganglion cell. Whether a transient or sustained response was to be fired was determined right at that connection (Asari and Meister, 2012). In this way, the bipolar cell acts similar to the controller (Carpenter and Reddi, 190) in a motor control system, as it transmits the desired result of depolarization/hyperpolarization to the plant, which is the ganglion cell in this case.
In the motor systems this would be noise and something similar could affect this retinal circuit. In order to be most effective in increasing retinal computations and system control a feedback mechanism is necessary. In the retina this is done by the amacrine cells. Asari and Meister were able to demonstrate that pharmacologically blocking amacrine-ganglion connections alters the type of potential fired. The amacrine cell is attenuating and/or changing the form of the potential. When inhibited, the once transient potentials become sustained with a larger amplitude. Thus the amacrine cells are able to regulate the desired result of this