Brain And Visual Perception: The Story Of A 25-year Collaboration > Neurology

Scientists' understanding of two central problems in neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy has been greatly influenced by the work of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel: (1) What is it to see? This relates to the machinery that underlies visual perception. (2) 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 autobiographies of both men, describes the state of the field when they started, and tells 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 authors' view of the present state of the field. This is much more than a collection of reprinted papers. Above all it tells the story of an unusual scientific collaboration that was hugely enjoyable and served to transform an entire branch of neurobiology. It will appeal to neuroscientists, vision scientists, biologists, psychologists, physicists, historians of science, and to their students and trainees, at all levels from high school on, as well as anyone else who is interested in the scientific process.

Part I. Introduction and Biographies
1. David H. Hubel
2. Torsten N. Wiesel
Part II. Background to Our Research
3. Cortical Neurophysiology in the 1950's
4. The Group at Johns Hopkins
5. The Move from Hopkins to Harvard
6. The New Department
Part III. Normal Physiology and Anatomy
7. Our First Paper, on Cat Cortex, 1959
8. Recordings from Fibers in the Monkey Optic Nerve9. Recordings from Cells in the Cat Lateral Geniculate
10. Our Major Paper on Cat Striate Cortex, 1962
11. Recordings from the Cat Prestriate Areas, 18 and 19
12. Survey of the Monkey Lateral Geniculate Body--A Foray into Color
13. Recording Fibers in the Cat Corpus Collosum
14. Recordings in Monkey Striate Cortex, 1968
15. Another Visual Representation, the Cat Clare-Bishop Area
16 Encoding of Binocular Depth in a Cortical Area in the Monkey.
17. Anatomy of the Geniculo-cortical Pathway: The Nauta Method
18. Ocular Dominance Columns Revealed by Autoradiography
19. Regular Sequences of Orientation Shifts in Monkeys
20. Cortical Modules and Magnification in Monkeys
Part IV. Deprivation and Development
21. The First Three Kitten Deprivation Papers
22. The Second Group of Deprivation Papers
23. The Siamese Cat
24. Cells Grouped in Orientation Columns in Newborn Monkeys25. Plasticity and Development of Monkeys Ocular Dominance ColumnsPart V. Three Reviews
26. Ferrier Lecture, 1977
27. Nobel Lecture, David H. Hubel, 1981Nobel Lecture, Torsten N. Wiesel, 1981
28. Epilogue: Summing Up

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