The goal of our research is to uncover the neural circuitry that mediates some of the remarkable processing capabilities of the retina. The retina to operates at high spatial and temporal resolution over more than 7 orders of magnitude, to detect the direction of motion, to blank and then recover after saccades, to generate at least a dozen different abstract representations of the visual world. How is all of this, and much more, possible in this tissuepaper-thin array of neurons?