When he recalled his school science Mike said : "The physics and biology teaching was terrific and the chemistry indifferent. I think this combination pre-adapted me for looking at things like the workings of strange eyes and away from the molecular biology that was then exciting others". In school he he led the choir and developed a life long love of singing and spent his spare time nurturing his life long love of hunting for rare local plants, especially orchids.
In 1960, Mike and fellow boarder, Crispin Wright, who later built a career as a philosopher, both won places to study at Cambridge University, Mike to read Natural Sciences at Jesus College and Crispin, Moral Sciences at Trinity College.
Mike later said : "At Cambridge I developed an almost Victorian passion for invertebrates, largely because of the superb lectures of Carl Pantin (Professor of Zoology), who managed to combine the taxonomy, physiology and ecology of each group in an inspired way. The colossal scale of evolution began to dawn on me too, and the realization that the vertebrates are only a small corner of the big picture".
After graduating in zoology in 1963, in his research for his PhD at University College London, he was fortunate to be supervised by the Nobel prize-winning physiologist, Andrew Huxley. Mike chose as his focus ‘The Eye of the Scallop, Pecten’, and there was a rumour that there was, initially, some conflict of opinion between Andrew and Mike about what aspect of Pecten vision it would be most profitable to pursue. Andrew favoured neurophysiology, whereas Mike wanted to follow up the seemingly hair-brained notion that the eye of the scallop has a concave mirror behind its retina that reflects the light back to form a real image of the visual field by reflection. He had started by investigating how scallops evade the attacks of predatory starfish and was supposed to investigate what passed for the brain of this shellfish, but found its eyes far more interesting. In the event he won the argument with Andrew which apparently, was a very,very rare occurrence.
Mike recalled that during the first year of his doctorate : "I had a stroke of luck. I looked into one of the 60 eyes of a scallop, the animal I was working on for reasons unrelated to vision, and saw an upside down image of myself. It dawned on me that something was wrong: the image was too bright and, as I was looking at it through the lens, it should have been near infinity and not actually in the eye. The answer turned out to be that this is almost the only example in nature of an eye that uses a concave mirror rather than a lens to form an image. My first real ‘aha’ moment. I’ve had three or four since, but that was the first and the sweetest". At the age of 25, he scored that first by showing that scallops focus light on the retinae of their 200 eyes by means of tiny mirrors, acting like a Newtonian telescope.
His achievement in physiological optics caught the eye of Gerald Westheimer who invited him to visit the School of Optometry at Berkeley, California as an Assistant Professor of Physiology. Within a few days of arriving, Mike had set up an ophthalmoscope for viewing the eyes of jumping spiders, which he was then studying, and within a short space of time hordes of Alumni descended on the School of Optometry and were entertained and instructed in demonstrations and lectures. Mike had shown many sceptical American optometrists that the straightforward pursuit of knowledge for its own sake is certainly an interesting, enjoyable and possibly worthy occupation, in spite of the fact that the research was clearly not being done for its potential commercial rewards.
In fact, Michael had chosen these arachnids because they did not build webs but were visual hunters. He examined the anatomy of their eyes which were eight in number and all fixed to the carapace. Only the two forward looking eyes had high acuity vision and Michael showed how the retina itself scanned across the scene to enhance the eyes’ field of view in way that picked out important features like prey and potential mates.
His work in Neurophysiology, was to now take him on his lifetime study of an evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of animal sight and its underlying mechanistic control by the nervous system. In 2011 he said : "Vision has been central to my scientific career, first in the study of animal eyes, and then human eye movements".
In 2009 the the 'Journal of Experimental Biology' made an assessment of his research when it said : 'Out of Berkeley back in the turbulent 1960s, when Berkeley's nickname was `Berserkeley' and a young Englishman at the University of California, Mike Land, was carrying out his staggeringly elegant research on salticid eyes. In 1969, the year when, 380,000 miles away, people were walking on the Moon, these papers appeared as 51 back-to-back pages in the Journal of Experimental Biology and they have defined how we think about salticids ever since. ONE SMALL LEAP FOR THE JUMPING SPIDER BUT A GIANT STEP FOR VISION SCIENCE'.
Specifically, he worked on vision in flies and deep‐sea animals, especially shrimp, which also had reflecting eyes. His research revealed the many different ways in which animals saw their own versions of reality, often to find members of the opposite sex. His 1976 discovery that prawns focus light not by lenses, but with a structure of mirror-lined boxes, helped lead to the creation of a method to focus X-rays.
His career at Sussex prospered : He was appointed a Reader in 1977, at the age of 35 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 40 in 1982 and in the same year began a two year stint at Australian National University in Canberra as a Senior Research Fellow. Daniel Osorio recalled : "I was working there, and recall him in a heavy sweat one lunchtime – he had spent the morning observing the retina of a highly venomous red-bellied black snake, which, although sedated, was far too close for comfort".
Michael invited a young Swedish researcher, Dan-Eric Nilsson, to join him in Canberra and together they found that under each facet lens in a butterfly’s eye was a complete Galilean telescope, 'collimating' or 'making into a parallel beam', the incoming light by means of an extraordinarily powerful 'eyepiece' lens with a focal length of a few millionths of a metre.
On his return to Sussex in 1984, Michael was appointed Professor of Neurobiology in the Vision Laboratory, the 'Land Lab' at the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience and it was here in the 1990s that he switched from invertebrate eyes to human eye movements and commented : "It wasn’t that much of a change. I’d worked on movements of spiders, flies and mantis shrimps before, so I was really only extending my range of animals. Besides, it was nice to work on an animal you could actually talk to. More seriously, although eye movement recordings had been made for almost a century, up until about 1990 there was very little work on the eye movement strategies used by people doing ordinary things, walking, driving, preparing food, playing games and so on. There really wasn’t a 'Natural History of Eye Movements'".
He also said that "after 1990 I turned to human vision, particularly the eye movements we make to obtain the information we need for actions. My current work on eye movements was certainly inspired by one picture in the book by Alfred Yarbus, 'Eye Movements and Vision'. The picture is of a painting ‘The Unexpected Visitor’, representing the return of a man to a family, with the eye movements of a viewer superimposed. The clever thing Yarbus did, was to ask his viewer different questions about the picture, for example, estimate : 'How long the visitor had been away from the family ?' and for each question he got a quite different pattern of eye movements, each clearly related to that particular question. This was the first clear demonstration that eye movements are not just reflexive movements to prominent features in the surroundings, but are related to the viewer’s thoughts. This seems obvious now, but it wasn’t then".
In addition, Michael said : "About that time, wearable eye trackers became available, and there was an obvious niche to fill. It was interesting coming to the field from Zoology, because eye movement research had mainly been the province of psychologists and physiologists, both of whom like their experimental conditions to be tightly controlled".
He developed a simple device to track humans’ gaze as they moved their eyes while doing everyday tasks and in that, he followed the old tradition, where researchers often worked alone and made their own kit. His eye tracker consisted of a small video camera and an arrangement of mirrors that recorded both the eye and the scene, and fitted on to the head.
Later, he used a similar naturalistic approach in examining how people deploy their eye movements, first in everyday tasks like tea making and driving and then sports and games. In 2000, for example, he and a colleague reported their finding that, within 200 milliseconds after a ball leaving a cricket bowler's hand, the best batsmen will take their eyes off the ball and look ahead to the point where they have calculated it will bounce. His work demonstrated that eye movements are a window into how people attend to the world around them and the strategies that they use to accomplish skilled tasks, like hitting or catching a cricket ball and organising a sequence of actions like putting tea in the pot before adding water.
In his tea making sequence he highlighted the eye's focus with a white dot : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtYFNsRcxY4 He described the process in his 2000 article : 'In what ways do eye movements contribute to everyday activities?'
In 2001 He collaborated with Benjamin W. Tatler to write : 'Steering with the head: The visual strategy of a racing driver'. They set out to study : 'The eye movements of a racing driver on a familiar track during high-speed practice to see whether he took will be driving largely from memory, only using landmarks in visual information in a different way from a normal such as curve apexes as timing cues, rather than having driver on a winding road'.
In 2002 he wrote : 'I am still active in the field of animal vision, but much of my work in that field was consolidated in a book 'Animal Eyes' with Dan-Eric Nilsson from Lund in Sweden'. Three years later Mike retired as a full time academic, at the age of 63, and before he did had said : 'As I approach what I hope will be an active retirement the opportunities for finding the small amounts of money I will need diminish further. Universities had that sort of petty cash once, now they don’t. It would be good if someone would address the needs of wrinklies who won’t go quietly'.
He remained busy and The following year he published 'Eye movements and the control of actions in everyday life'. and in 2009, in his 'Looking and Acting', co-authored with Ben Tatler, he ranged over: where motorists look when they steer; the differences between first-class and village-green cricketers; how pianists move their gaze between music and keyboard and, of course, where we look when we brew a pot of tea. In this they illustrated where they had found subtle and specific rules about where people look and what they see, often unconsciously.
In 2012 at the age of 70 he wrote : 'In the last few years I have become interested in the ancient problem of why the subjective world stays still in spite of the more or less continual shifts of our position and viewpoint within it'. Then, his final book in 2018, 'Eyes to See', was part memoir and part guide to the science of vision and ranged over : Early eyes; compound eyes and insect vision; vision in the ocean; where do people look? ; the mind's eye and the evolution of vision. He said : 'I have spent the last fifty years studying the eyes and vision of animals, including man. During that time there have been many discoveries and ideas from vision research that have intrigued me, most of these are known to other scientists, but not more widely. Yet everyone who can see is interested, at some level, with the extraordinary processes involved in imaging the world around us, and in translating those images into perceptions and actions. For many, but not all, animals, vision is the most important sense for guiding action, and this is achieved in many different ways by animals at different levels of evolutionary complexity, from molluscs to man'.
'One of the strange features of our eye movements is that we are scarcely aware of them. Every time we make a saccade the images shifts dramatically across our retinas, and yet we don’t see this; rather, we see a stable world which our gaze roams freely across, but without the abrupt disconnections that occur to the images themselves. This raises many interesting questions about the way our brains “edit” the information from the eyes before it reaches conscious perception. Although it has been known for many years that different regions of the brain deal with different aspects of the image, such as form, distance, motion and colour, there is no single brain area that holds an image of the world as we think we see it. This and other enigmatic features of vision continue to puzzle both philosophers and scientists'.
"When I was working at Plymouth on reflecting structures with the great marine biologist Eric Denton, we got a nice result one day. He said : We can only assume that, over his long career, Michael had many good dinners.
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