Although adaptation is a ubiquitous property of neurons in the early visual pathway, the functional consequences in the natural visual environment are unknown. In this issue of Neuron, Mante et al. show, through a comprehensive set of in vivo experiments in the visual thalamus, that the basic functional mechanisms of adaptation that have been well studied with artificial probes capture the neuronal response in the natural environment and are predictable from properties of the visual scene that may be represented by local neural ensembles.