How we make our visual world appear to be constant.

At the same time that our brains command a body movement, they also generate an expection of the sensory outcome of that movement that is checked against the actual results. The nerve pathways underlying this elegant control system have not been well understood. Now comes a nice piece of work from Sommer and Wurtz. In their own words: "Each of our movements activates our own sensory receptors, and therefore keeping track of self-movement is a necessary part of analysing sensory input. One way in which the brain keeps track of self-movement is by monitoring an internal copy, or corollary discharge, of motor commands. This concept could explain why we perceive a stable visual world despite our frequent quick, or saccadic, eye movements: corollary discharge about each saccade would permit the visual system to ignore saccade-induced visual changes. The critical missing link has been the connection between corollary discharge and visual processing. Here we show that such a link is formed by a corollary discharge from the thalamus that targets the frontal cortex. In the thalamus, neurons in the mediodorsal nucleus relay a corollary discharge of saccades from the midbrain superior colliculus to the cortical frontal eye field. In the frontal eye field, neurons use corollary discharge to shift their visual receptive fields spatially before saccades...These experiments establish the first link between corollary discharge and visual processing, delineate a brain circuit that is well suited for mediating visual stability, and provide a framework for studying corollary discharge in other sensory systems."