Yes. The nerves are an organic form of fiber-optics that work in the low end of the infrared. Somewhere around 980,to 1070 nm.

I was just about to ask about signal latency myself. We get around that by having the highest bandwidth inputs located right next to our processors.

Is it direct transmission all the way through or are there repeaters? (Every nerve cell of ours basically functions as a signal repeater.)

What about encoding? Is there a discrete encoding organ in the sensory node or is it distributed through a large set of little light emitting encoders?

Damn, I'm sorry I never got back to your question. As I understand it, every neuro fiber is a length of fiber optic filament with a emitter-receptor node at each end.

So a filament going from one of the eye lenses down through to a receptor in the thorax brain?

If the optical receptor is on the brain, can they get brain damage from fantastically bright lights?

Damn, Again I'm sorry for taking so long with this.( I really need to check back through the comments more often.) No, even if the blast of light was of the same frequency, the nerve bundles are sheathed in a 100% opaque material, and they have an inner eye-film that acts like our polarizing sunglasses and blocks the light as well.

Well, most deep dwellers have more than one brain. however, you might get lucky and take out the main brain before it had time to download it's awareness of you.

Ed.