MBExC Lecture

Prof. Mikko Juusola from the University of Sheffield, UK will held a talk about “Synaptic high-frequency jumping” during the MBExC Lecture on 11 May, 2026 at 1:00 p.m. at the MPI-NAT City Campus, lecture hall, Hermann-Rein-Str. 3.

Host: Prof. Dr. Martin Göpfert, Uni Göttingen

Abstract: For centuries, from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia to the ideas of Charles Darwin and Sigmund Exner, insect compound eyes have been viewed as fundamentally limited by their fixed, faceted structure – producing a coarse, pixel-like representation of the world. Our new work challenges this long-standing assumption. We show that insect vision is not static but dynamically shaped by movement: both the animal’s rapid, saccadic turns and microscopic movements within the eye itself actively enhance what is seen.

When insects move, their eyes do not simply record images – they actively sample the world in bursts. These rapid shifts, combined with the physics of light detection in thousands of tiny photoreceptive units, generate especially strong and precisely timed signals. At the first synapse in the visual system, this leads to a striking effect we term synaptic high-frequency jumping: the neural signal is reshaped to carry much faster fluctuations than previously thought possible, effectively boosting temporal resolution while minimising delay. In essence, motion transforms the visual system into a high-speed encoder.

This mechanism explains how insects achieve hyperacute vision – resolving fine detail far beyond what their eye structure alone would predict – while reacting in just milliseconds during flight. More broadly, the findings point to a new principle of neural computation: perception emerges from tightly coupled dynamics between behaviour and neural processing. Rather than passively filtering inputs, the brain actively structures them in time, suggesting new ways to think about both biological and artificial vision.

Poster of the talk: