A new Tel Aviv University study suggests that a sophisticated kind of visual processing once thought to be mainly a mammal feature was already present far earlier in evolution and that understanding it could eventually help researchers tackle brain disorders, according to TPS-IL.

“We showed that complex brain computation already existed in the cerebral cortex of pond turtles 320 million years ago, which is probably the first that ever appeared in evolution,” Dr. Mark Shein-Idelson from the Department of Neurobiology and the Sagol School of Neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, who led the research, told The Press Service of Israel. “Understanding this ability of visual coding of the brain can open the door in the future to better understand and solve diseases that emanate from defaults in the brain,” he said.

The study, recently published in the peer-reviewed Science Advances, examined how the turtle’s dorsal cortex, the higher area of the brain that shares a common ancestral origin as that of mammals, processes visual information. The researchers measured brain activity in awake turtles while keeping track of where the animals looked.

Shein-Idelson said the key finding was consistency: turtles reacted strongly to an unexpected visual change even when it fell on a different part of the retina because the animal had moved its head or eyes. Put simply, the said, the turtle brain can recognize that something new has happened in the environment even when the viewing angle changes.

The team also found a telling contrast. Movements generated by the animal itself, such as routine head or eye shifts, triggered little brain response even though they changed what the eyes were seeing. But a small and unexpected change in the outside world produced a clear neural reaction. Shein-Idelson said this points to an ability to filter out self-caused visual “noise” and highlight information that may require attention.

According to Shein-Idelson, the findings change how scientists think about the evolution of the brain. For years, many researchers assumed that this kind of stable visual recognition emerged only later, and mostly in more complex brains such as those of monkeys and humans. This study, he said, suggests that a version of that computation existed much earlier.

For medicine, the work offers a research angle rather than a ready-made treatment. Still, Shein-Idelson argued that clearer insight into how healthy brain circuits separate meaningful signals from background changes could eventually inform how researchers approach conditions where those circuits break down.

“Certain diseases, like genetic disorders or stroke related conditions, include a failure of brain circuitry. If we have a better understanding of how the brain works and computes data, we can treat its failures better,” he said.