Notes

The retina is the part of the eye that transforms light energy into electrical signals interpretable by the brain (AP). The light arrives from the bottom and passes through all these other cells before reaching the photoreceptors (receptor terminals), so all the circuitry before the photoreceptors has to be transparent.

Light is a noisy source of information (photon noise), but also the retina is a noisy system. Indeed, at each level of processing some noise is added. The brain is capable (via compensation) to process reliably visual information coming from unreliable components featuring noise. The action potentials generated by the retina are then projected through ganglionic cells axons to the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus.