Rockland sized the importance of visualization, it is worth remembering that images can be deceptive: experimenter reading-in hap- pens, often inadvertently. Almost all images carry interpretation, and the interpretation can err. Of many examples that “looks alone are deceptive,” Rokni et al. (2008) present evidence that cerebellar parallel fibers, a preeminently beamlike structure, actu- ally activate Purkinje cells in a patchlike fashion. It remains for further investigations in the barrel system to establish whether these distinct thalamic compartments are func- tionally distinct or interactive. This should be significantly expedited by the current generation of experiments in alert animals, which can more directly address questions of active sensory perception and the inter- actions of motor-control and sensation (Ahissar, 2008; Brecht, 2007; Petersen, 2007). Over the longer term, one can realis- tically hope for a rigorous and enlightening comparison of processing mechanisms in the rodent barrel system with that of other specialized systems, such as the primate visual (Nassi and Callaway, 2009). RRfescne Ahissar, E. (2008). And motion changes it all. Nat. Neurosci. 11, 1369–1370. Alloway, K. D. (2008). Information processing streams in rodent barrel cortex: the different functions of barrel and septal circuits. Cereb. Cortex 18, 979–989. Brecht, M. (2007). Barrel cortex and whisker-mediated behaviors. Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 17, 1–9. Haidarliu, S., Yu, C., Rubin, N., and Ahissar, E. (2008). Lemniscal and extralemniscal compartments in the VPM of the rat. Front. Neuroanat. 2, 1–10. Nassi, J. J., and Callaway, E. M. (2009). Parallel process- ing strategies of the primate visual system. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 10, 360–372. Petersen, C. C. H. (2007). The functional organization of the barrel cortex. Neuron 56, 339–355. Rokni, D., Llinas, R., and Yarom, Y. (2008). The mor- pho/functional discrepancy in the cerebebellar cortex: looks alone are deceptive. Front. Neurosci. 2, 192–198. Urbain, N., and Deschenes, M. (2007). A new thalamic pathway of vibrissal information modulated by the motor cortex. J. Neurosci. 27, 12407–12412. Yu, C., Derdikman, D., Haidarliu, S., and Ahissar E. (2006). Parallel thalamic pathways for whisk- ing and touch signals in the rat. PLoS Biol. 4, 819–825. Received: 22 April 2009; published: 15 September 2009. Citation: Front. Neurosci. (2009) 3, 2: 164-165. doi: 10.3389/neuro.01.022.2009 Copyright © 2009 Rockland. This is an open-access pub- lication subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience www.frontiersin.org September 2009 | Volume 3 | Issue 2 | 165