Recent studies of visual perception have begun to reveal the connection between neuronal activity in the brain and conscious visual experience.

Science Direct, Pubmed, (2010 through 2017) were searched for English-language studies using a list of keywords. The books about neuroscience and medicine were studied too.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation of the human occipital lobe disrupts the normal perception of objects in ways suggesting that important aspects of visual perception are based on activity in early visual cortical areas. Recordings made with microelectrodes in animals suggest that the perception of the lightness and depth of visual surfaces develops through computations performed across multiple brain areas. Activity in earlier areas is more tightly correlated with the physical properties of objects whereas neurons in later areas respond in a manner more similar to visual perception.

The studies of lightness perception and depth perception lead to a similar conclusion about the relationship between brain activity and conscious visual perception. Rather than being based on neural activity in one special area, visual perception involves progressive computations spread across multiple brain areas. Both early areas, as in the TMS study, and later areas, as in the study of area IT, are involved in perception. The visual system masterfully recovers information about the objects in our environment based partly on processes of integration and normalization and partly on hard-wired probabilities of what objects are most likely to result from particular retinal images.