Lets talk about the visual system, in particular what we know about visual cortex. One of the big nobel-prize winning works were by Hubel and Weisel where they stuck an extracellular electrode in V1 and made a cat watch a shiny bar. They would hold the bar in different orientations and locations and the bar could be resized. This video explains everything:
Anyway, what they discovered was that cortical neurons have receptive fields that are like oriented bars. And different neurons would have different orientations. They also clearly show that they have on-centers and off-surrounds. I this type of on-off was known at the time as the retinal cells have circular on-off receptive fields. Here's how they thought it worked:
There's been so much work on what these receptive fields mean, and everyone tries to explain them to explain what cortex is doing.
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