Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-year Collaboration
DAVID H. HUBEL and TORSTEN N. WIESEL
Abstract
Scientists' understanding of two central problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: What is it to see? This relates to the machinery that underlies visual perception, How do we acquire the brain's mechanisms for vision? This is the nature-nurture question as to whether the nerve connections responsible for vision are innate or whether they develop through experience in the early life of an animal or human. This is a book about the collaboration between Hubel and Wiesel, which began in 1958, lasted until about ... More
Scientists' understanding of two central problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: What is it to see? This relates to the machinery that underlies visual perception, How do we acquire the brain's mechanisms for vision? This is the nature-nurture question as to whether the nerve connections responsible for vision are innate or whether they develop through experience in the early life of an animal or human. This is a book about the collaboration between Hubel and Wiesel, which began in 1958, lasted until about 1982, and led to a Nobel Prize in 1981. It opens with short biographies of both men, describes the state of the field when they started, and talks about the beginnings of their collaboration. It emphasizes the importance of various mentors in their lives, especially Stephen W. Kuffler, who opened up the field by studying the cat retina in 1950, and founded the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, where most of their work was done. The main part of the book consists of Hubel and Wiesel's most important publications. Each reprinted paper is preceded by a foreword that tells how they went about the research, what the difficulties and the pleasures were, and whether they felt a paper was important and why. Each is also followed by an afterword describing how the paper was received and what developments have occurred since its publication. The reader learns things that are often absent from typical scientific publications, including whether the work was difficult, fun, personally rewarding, exhilarating, or just plain tedious. The book ends with a summing-up of the present state of the field.
Keywords:
David Hubel,
Torstein Wiesel,
vision,
visual perception,
Nobel Prize,
Stephen Kuffler,
brain
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2004 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780195176186 |
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: March 2012 |
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195176186.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
DAVID H. HUBEL, author
John Franklin Enders University Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School
TORSTEN N. WIESEL, author
Director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behaviour, and President Emeritus, The Rockefeller University; Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program; President of the International Brain Research Organisation
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