 So it's a it's a real pleasure to welcome you all to this symposium on animal vision and of course one of our major purposes is to celebrate the life and work of my clan and as we go through the you'll find out how wide-ranging his interests in neuroscience and behavioral science in general were but also in visual neuroscience we'll be hearing about work a lot of work on invertebrates but going up to vertebrates including humans and so we've got a very kind of wide-ranging programme and I particularly want to thank the speakers who are coming from abroad, from Sweden, Tom here from the States, Ben from Scotland that's a broader thing. And you know in organising this and asking people if they would be interested in this symposium I was incredibly kind of impressed by the warmth and enthusiasm of which people kind of approach this idea of having a symposium to celebrate Mike's work and I hope we're just going to have a fun day and enjoy it in the way Mike would. You can see from this photo he's a guy who really enjoyed his science incredibly curious about a wide range of things and that's reflected in the programme so we've got your speakers to be speaking on issues that work that Mike worked on throughout his career in invertebrate visual science but in the later part of his career Mike got interested in human vision and how Gaze is directed to analyse the visual scene would be hearing about that from Ben Tackler. But I got to know Mike, I knew him when I was a tiny little PhD student, the name Mike Land would kind of float around the visual science community but I didn't really get to know him until I arrived here at Sussex and Mike was incredibly encouraging and helpful and just a wonderful wonderful colleague in which I could had him for a colleague longer but anyway and one of his characteristics was how encouraging was of younger scientists so we made a point of including in the symposium earlier career of scientists because Mike was always interested in new things that were happening, new techniques that were being applied, not necessarily just this particular questions that he was most involved in but questions kind of spanning all different areas of neuroscience so we tried to inject that into the symposium because I think that's what Mike would have enjoyed. But anyway this symposium is for all of us and I'm going to really encourage the speakers to leave time to let the audience get involved with their questions and to participate and I'm now going to hand over to Tom, Tom is going to be incredibly helpful organizing this symposium and he's going to tell us a bit about Mike in general. So good morning, it's nice to see so many old friends and new friends and those of you I don't know, I worked with Mike for quite a while so Leon asked me to kind of kick this off and I'm happy to do that although Leon said that I helped with the organization I did almost none and he did 99% of it but it's nice to be here so I'm going to give sort of a casual coverage of Mike's life and talk about his other interests besides because scientific ones that many of you don't know much about and a little bit about my personal interactions with him over the years so my title kind of reflects the diversity of the things that Mike was to me and which way so Mike was born in Dartmouth so he was a Southerner as he was born but he lived all over England during his growing up years here he is at the Asia tree with his older brother Tony he also had a younger sister Janet they were three of them in the family and when he was young they moved to the north up to the mercy side up to Birkenhead and there during school he became interested in collecting plants so its first biological interests were really going out in the field this is a park in Birkenhead here and basically as he says squishing everything he could pull out of the ground he'd eat pieces of paper but later as he went on further in life he discovered there were things out there in the fields that also moved and had eyes and his interest kind of expanded to zoology so when he went to Cambridge he entered Cambridge in 1960 he then joined the zoology department there as an undergraduate and there he ran into somebody who may be famous to anybody in my generation of invertebrate science that's Carl Panton who was a professor of zoology at Cambridge who was really a comparative what the classic comparative physiologists who worked on almost anything that you could get his hands on but he was interested in neurobiology as well as the very physiology of the writings and I never met himself in myself but even as a grad student I was introduced to his work and I knew him as a pretty enthusiastic guy and I understand he really was somebody who was infectious and clearly infectious in the sense that he infected Mike with a lot of marine animals and of neurobiology creatures so then Mike went on to continue his work he went to university in college of Panton where he joined the physiology and his original plan was to work with John Gray and the thesis topic was going to be how the nervous system of the scallop generates the scallop's behavior really neuroethology at its very basic form but when he finally picked up the scallop to look at one carefully he realized that the eyes were very strange you could look into the blue eyes of a scallop and you could see a reflection of yourself in in something in the back of it the image was erect which is not with a lens eye so he immediately realized something odd about these optics so he went to go ahead and study the optics and he did that with the help he did the optic won't work but the help of Sir Andrew Huntsley was also at UCL at that time he said working with Sir Andrew was rather scary but he helped to develop the idea behind the quarter wave of reflected that they discovered in the eye of the scallop and he also went down to a woods uh to the um the lab where he worked with Eric Denton on reflective scales and fishes so you could see all all of his mentors had the same first name so you could see you know the um but here's a scallop eye they're they're quite beautiful they're blue and you can't really see it but you can get a sense of the back of the eye there's something shiny back there and Mike showed them that there was this biological mirror that existed here in the rear of the eye so this thing is a mirror you can't you'll see a little bit more of the military time to drop here and there's also a lens the lens is fairly weak and is not terribly important in the optics the main optical feature is actually the mirror at the back and this was the first eye that really had been described that used mirror optics there've been others found since and we'll talk about some of but this was this was a major discovery and we also with with the help of Huxley worked out how this works through a series of guanine and then cytoplasm layers that have alternating refractive indices and the and the reflection at each of the interfaces is in case at a certain wavelength and that produces a strongly colored very bright reflection which can then be used to form an image on the retina so this this is what really Mike was very proud throughout his whole life of this discovery it was his first major discovery and from there once he finished he then moved on to Berkeley for a postdoc and then he actually was an assistant professor at Berkeley for a few years but he was there during the Vietnam War and at a time of great turmoil the first great sort of student revolution in America and he said because of all the excitement I didn't get much done but but Mike doesn't get much done that only means he does twice as much as everybody else so while he was there he picked up a project where he was working with Gerald Westheimer who was his postdoctoral advisor. Gerald works on physiological optics quite narrowly and vertebratized and so Mike learned a lot about working without people who put them through him and he also worked and was influenced by Richard Eakin who developed a theory of total receptor evolution and development function and he was a really highly respected evolution that evolved this way he went through the system since also got sort of involved in Mike's thinking and formed the way he thought about how eyes work and how they evolved and also with Horace Barlow who was at Berkeley at that time was probably going back to England eventually but a really strong physical of optics person and the person thought about natural scenes and the statistics of vision which also influenced Mike's work so there Mike worked on a totally different animal than scallops and with a totally different eye type jumping spiders which lived in the redwood trees around the campus on Berkeley and he worked out how their eyes sample space through the four pairs of eyes that they had and he worked on how they'd written those forms and how it has these tiered layers of photoreceptors but perhaps more importantly he needed all the way of looking into the eye Westheimer's work on up top of Scottie Lewis in there and he designed an ophthalmoscope that could see the inside of a living spider's eye and see how it worked on spider was it's looking at actual objects and so with that he actually was this was the start of his work really on eye movements this was the beginning of what later became a passion for Mike was how animals inspect space by moving their eyes in the case of spiders they don't actually move the eyes they actually move the retinas within the eyes of the whole retina can move back and forth in the eye too and can then be scanned sideways can also rotate so as a really interesting set of eye movements these two little boomerang things were actually the redness with the principal eyes as seen in the ophthalmoscope so he showed how they may use these movements to generate information about what they're looking at and they're about the mating displays and other aspects of this of the jumping spiders biology they were never left spiders really spider was one of his first loves since like this scholar's work and then in 71 he came here he was actually a visiting professor and managed to manage to pull out of the state because the person he came here to replace during the visit moved back to the states and stayed in the states so he ended up staying in Sussex for a long time this was taken it's not really certain whether he took this is taken but when he was still in California his first year in Sussex but it's about the time that Adam was born his first child because he happens to be about two here in this picture so it could have been taken in Sussex that he was about the time he arrived and he was here long enough so he probably could be August gentleman that he might remember more recently and this is he's the Sussex for the rest of his career real that's drifted around the world for short periods of time but always we're trying back here to the university and here one of his first major research endeavors involved working with Tom Pollock on how animals use their eyes in in interacting with each other and chasing behavior and how they how they managed to see each other and generate the very complex and high-speed behavior that you can follow each other so here you see a fly in front which is the white trace and a fly following it this is a housefly family and you can see that the the followers trace really perfectly duplicates the trace of the year i'm not the leader of this particular situation Tom's going to talk later on and you'll probably be talking about this based on what i saw from the time you were talking here's another example where the hoverfly serrita this is a female and this is a male and you notice that every corresponding number of male is looking at the female you notice the male is rather sneakily backing off to maintain a constant distance between him and the female as he views her basically his eyes are better than hers and he's able to maintain a position where he could see her quite well as she can't see him at all which is it's been like a normal sort of thing so then after he was settled down here he got involved with peter herring who was marine biologist and peter invited mike to go on a number of cruises on the research ship discovery and mike really but that was something that he really talked to his father had been in the navy his father was actually a naval officer then his father was a professor of education but he was a mathematician and in any case maybe he was kind of in his blood so he was happy to see him and although there had been better bit of work done on the eyes of dc fishes the eyes of rain and vertebrates were pretty much untouched territory at the time that mike started looking at them so basically it was a whole literal world of new visual systems to look at and so he made a number of really several discoveries there here he ends up the proud of his ship leading the way of course the port of this ship is actually sitting on land but it makes a nice picture this is what he was on sabbatical at that time i think i'd not be free of what it was but here he is on discovery with rod duggins who's out to the audience today oh you can see here over there it's the same guy you might go so yeah this was an 87 uh this is a couple a couple of other pictures that i recently discovered when i was in bristol they were offered strategies out of his file so here's mike at sea in 1987 again you might recognize some other people in the picture and i could be recognized by you we were over here small friend of mine and she was really very young so mike mike was quite happy to go to sea you can see here he is in the lab at sea i don't have any of you work at sea but it's not as easy as it is but you're in the around here at sessings um mathematics sort of hard to work at it when you have a ship that's tossing back and forth you're looking at a piece of paper that's moving in front of your eyes mathematics game harder than here at least i can solve a problem that you can see also one of these pieces of apparatus that you don't live in here in the front um so one of one of his discoveries just to mention a few things one was that eyes can you already knew that eyes can use mirrors but here you should also compound eyes can use mirrors in their outer optics to form a superposition image on the retina that is a bright highly registered well-focused image that was a photos he discovered independently of carl book who was working in germany at the same time his principal came up but he didn't know but this is the second reflecting eye that he discovered in his career he also worked on the eyes of mysids and new thousands and after he's practicing to missionize here the lenses don't work as mirrors obviously we work as lens lenses and the optics are lens cylinders a property that he's been discovered by x much earlier but might actually do the interference my cross to be to work out the the actual optics at each point in this lens cylinder and to show how they work before many wrecked image from the retina so this is a totally different way of forming a superposition image he also worked with this crazy animal from niva and his relatives that are fiber optic optics within the lens set on the top that focus the incoming light onto a fiber optic that travels all the way down to the head of the animal and then reaches the retina down here this is the second retina on the side that has more substantial optics so yet another interesting optical principle he mapped out how these animals sample space these are nip water ventures in the deep sea really straightening down was really building wonderful pre-59 periods and he so this is also showing how the rise actually sampled space this particular animal almost this entire video video does like this line shows that almost all of its information comes from overhead and it's like um here's a different kind of eye from a few sea animals this particular one is an as an acquisition eye acquisition eyes if you know anything about compilers are terrible for low light environments but this one works because there's a very few of its hidden spots which represents the view of one of the city and the center of the building that extremely wide angle acceptance is free from the sector and it's sort of a few receptors equal to a sense of large volume of space and it has a very short focal I see you get a rather pregnant in this great fat receptor and so these eyes actually work in the deep sea even though they're opposition fighting then he moves to a different area that would not just say that but within this he had another interesting aspect of vision in some animals that is that they have scanning eyes but here is a deep sea mollusk a pteropod that is a lens and I much like a vertebral vertebrate mollusk but this side the retina is actually just a strip you can see it here when you get it hop on here looking at the side on the eye actually rotates up and down to samples visual space with a very thin strip retina the way is a few receptors wide so vision is formed by scanning through space another example is an animal you described called avidasura a pteropod which has a scanning retina that swings back and forth at the upper lens remember he ducked it out dumping spiders earlier that had scanning retinas and another animal he worked on is one that I had been working on this is when we've been enjoying forces to look at look at eyes with manuscripts he also found a way to map the movements of eyes and manuscripts and they also scan I say inspect their environment so one of his themes that he wrote about in his reviews was scanning eyes he was four four different eyes that he worked with that all scan their environments to form images and why is that again I'm going to just look around they actually move a strip retina across the environment and the second major theme he wrote about was mirror optics so he discovered mirror optics his first major discovery also the mirror optics he did not know how to also describe them in the eyes of a the giant of icepod the ostropod the macrosypillod the gigantic cypress so in the end having gone through a variety of optical systems he argued it's faster piece which I think all of us who have looked at visceral optical optics have gone back to time and time again and it considered the gospel according to Michael it's it's in the handbook a century physiology a long chapter on the on the optics of animal eyes how they function and their limits and their benefits of each eye by type and even today which is about about 40 years later than this one written it's still a major a major resource for understanding the visceral optical optics is simple and not known to eyes but um and that also resulted that was in part helps sort of resolve in this book that he published with Dan Wilson on animal eyes which included many of those ideas plus other ideas about evolution and function and diversity that they put into different editions of the book this is the more recent edition but during all this time mike had gotten interested in eye movements and so eye movements became something that became a dominant thought in his mind and you could see these are reviews that he'd written and you could see these are about animals remote from that but at the all the time this was kind of leading him towards a new area of interest which was the eye movements of people and when I came to his lab in 89 the sephatical he was just beginning to think about looking at human eye movements and so he this was his first design for an eye tracker it looks rather inelegant but in fact it worked and he actually took this with him and went out I kind of shuttered to think about these days got into his car he drove through the streets of good lewis and wrote a book about a written chapter as a particle naturally is in nature and how people move their eyes as they're driving around town with this monstrous thing mounted on their head trying to avoid pedestrians who are walking down the side of the road you can see this little arrow points to a white dot which is the point at which the eye is looking this particular frame with a film so the way it works is it allows the of the fabric which is up here to capture the reflected image of the world which is what you see here at the same time is seeing another reflected image of the eye which is being bounced off this transparent here and uh by the position of people in the eye you can map where the eye is looking and you can you can then go back and place that direction of view onto the actual picture that was being taken by the by the board looking down at the same time this is a somewhat refined version i'm sure ben's going to talk quite a bit about these things i'm not going to go into this any great depth but this is a later refined version which looks a little more elegant it's less clumsy and with this he went on to look at a variety of aspects that do behavior one of them was driving and one point David went out and maybe then we'll talk about this they actually put this on the helmet of a racing driver and what with our racing driver uses his eyes compared to the way the normal models like us use our eyes when we drive with car we also looked at how sportsmen use their eyes when they're ball sports or other kinds of sports here you can see that a batsman watches it's hard to kind of see where you are but this is a fishing machine delivering a ball and the white spot you notice this the spot of the gaze goes right to the point where the ball is going to bounce and then it looks up to where he expects to see the ball to be when the bat is swung he's able to use the path that the balls travel with just a couple of saccades in the matter but since the time of a second you figure out where did his ball you looked at how magic tricks are performed by probably gaze during misdirection of petitions so yeah i think he had a lot of fun with this machine but one of the things that is sort of a classic is that he also used the eye tracker while making a cup of tea so here's my big tea and this is actually you know like you're assessing something right and how like how his eye moved about as he carried out a rather elaborate sequential series of steps during the process of making a couple of tea here's one of the frames in the video showing that he's actually about to drop a sugar into the cup of tea and from that he can track out each of these these dots is a point where the eye fixated its gaze and you see lines as the saccades between the two successive fixations and he can work out exactly how how the brain and the eye work together to allow a task to be carried out without a relatively confined but actually fairly complex tasks and this became something he was really interested in in the future was how how does the brain control our direction of our behavior and our understanding of what's going on in the world so that led to a book with with Ben on looking at acting which was published in 19 in 2009 about 15 years ago and I think if you're more about his his work at eye tracking up from Ben I'm sure that led me to then think about okay if the eye is doing these behaviors and it's being directed by the brain how the brain and the eye interact and how does this go together it's a build our mental picture of how the world works we all have a stable world and yet our brain has to construct that world as you move around for one place or another to make the change popular and everything else so this sort of final set of thoughts as he finished up his writing in the last few years was I see how the brain works and what is the basis of consciousness that had his vision fit into our conscious experience of living in the film and some of that was put into his his third book which went through to kind of track his career in the last chapter usually about vision and consciousness and how the US makes it together so that was Mike's career but I do want to talk a little bit about other things that might live because it was not just a scientist he was a human being he would get other interesting other things that may have been equally important to him in fact he said to me many times if I hadn't become a scientist I would have become a gardener and he always said that as if he really was ashamed of the wrong choice it's kind of a wishful state but not his part so here we are at this back garden this is back 2011 I hear a beautiful garden at the house Lewis at the full fail and then he established a new garden but they moved to ringware so this is their ring garden that was largely designed and then built by Michael those married I'm sure um another thing that he that he blessed us all with was the play of musical instruments he was interested in renaissance music listen to here he is with his kernel of making sounds that I won't really describe in any detail here he is it within a group of people who play in Lewis if you think you might have thought instruments you can see Rosemary's also here he is you'll notice no I've asked these two girls over here which one of you is this that's Chloe Chloe looking desperately to her father please get me out of here but while Mike is playing to her with his kernel and so here they can escape they're caught down here in Freddy's garden carefully listening to the so-called playing renaissance music to them in full in full garb so if you if you went to visit Mike an experience you always could look forward to with mixed feelings was listening to the turtle he's also here he's showing Chloe and Georgie I think it's a photograph of a about an author's view perhaps I'm not quite sure that's a stag beetle on this on actually a picture of Mike with an iPhone it's a unique photograph I think this may have been the only time so anyway the girls that a little a little more interested in the stag beetle than were in the uh this is his other child Adam would put one of his children so he was like enjoy great being a grandfather he loved having grandchildren now and so here's some interest here he is in residence music here he is he's photography and also here he's photographing Orkin you know whatever whatever we went out with him I'll walk to him but he actually has to visit the wildflowers I didn't know anyone because we're all the greatest man he also was a was himself an artist so this is one of his paintings and I'm going to finish up with sort of a personal thing about my my my interactions with Mike so I first met Mike here in Sussex in 1982 on a quick flying visit through the country I was just traveling as a tourist with my wife and my daughter but we first really got acquainted at a meeting in Regensburg in 1987 so this is Mike here somewhere where is he there we go this is Mike in 1987 this is Dan Eric who's here also and Dania Soria couldn't be here today and I'm way over here in the fringe is trying to make my way to the northern region desperately toxic seating at this point and this is uh you have to decide oh here's Mike's wife Mike's dress and the next thing that we're here so at this meeting we got into a conversation about management vision and he was working with a grad student here at Justin Marshall at that time and I was working on management vision over in the states and Mike in his typical gracious way said we'll make much more progress if we join forces then try to attack the problem separately so let's get together and work together on this together so that led to a sabbatical in England a couple of years later also then it being I thought this is perfect the copy of what kind of describes outside the sport we need in cafes around the world this is this is Mike and me in 1988 a couple of lives of students in my world at that time at a meeting in in bed and we were using Anna and that is sabbatical here in 1989 and at that time maybe still I don't even know it was very hard to omit a mission and so we all just made here for sweaters it seems they're all like I'm actually browsing and my wife designed this thing for me since the year for both of them here we are with my sweaters and then Mike came over to the states a couple of years later through a sabbatical in the states here they are our house in gatesville in 1992 and then we went out to an application mountains for some like this Mike which I might get who are a lot younger in fact this little girl is now the mother of twins and my grandchildren but then she was just a little girl these things happen here we are in 2003 sort of inish way there we're visiting Hebrew Castle where Anne Boleyn is grew up and this is the statue I'm talking about this is characteristic kind of pose of Mike and this is my wife who couldn't resist doing it plastic Sussex U of us here in 2011 out of the seven sisters this is the last time that me that Mike went to was about this good castle in 2019 40 years ago we are together at the castle and the last time I saw Mike was in January of 2020 when I was here for some undead policy with my family so this is the same little girl and uh Justin Marshall by public working on measures he's also there he was in my understanding in the back row so that was the last time I saw Mike and there's an image arise and possibly get back here again that's kind of a precious moment so that's my recollections of Mike and I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody has any questions or there's one thing I want to add one of Mike loved to write and he wrote beautifully and very entertaining really and you refer to a one of Mike's papers where he analyzed the eye movements of a batsman playing cricket and the message section of that it's a paper in nation neuroscience in the method section he very faithfully tries to explain the game of cricket it's a bit possible which is yeah but he tries so he starts the methods with he analyzes three batsmen they were marked professional cricketers open the batting tomorrow so Charlie a successful amateur plays minor counties cricket for us and Richard an enthusiastic but incompetent amateur who plays low level club cricket and he analyzes the game very simply uh very nicely the wicket is a strip of grass in which the game is played the condition of the ground influence over the ball bounces but well then the batsman has the option of playing a purely defensive shot with no obligation to run after hitting the ball the option for the batsman to play entirely defensively if he wishes contributes much to the character of the game and to his inscrutability as respectable to view as more familiar with baseballs yeah he also said later on that there are many requests for this article particularly from India I'm not from the UK okay thanks thanks