Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration

by David H. Hubel, Torsten N. Wiesel

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195176186
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/14/2004
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	744
Product dimensions:	7.04(w) x 10.30(h) x 1.67(d)

About the Author

The authors were both awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. David H. Hubel is John Franklin Enders University Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. Torsten N. Wiesel is Director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain and Behavior and President Emeritus of Rockefeller University. He is also Secretary General of the Human Frontier Science Program and President of the International Brain Research Organization.

Table of Contents

Part I. Introduction and Biographies1. David H. Hubel2. Torsten N. WieselPart II. Background to Our Research3. Cortical Neurophysiology in the 1950's4. The Group at Johns Hopkins5. The Move from Hopkins to Harvard6. The New DepartmentPart III. Normal Physiology and Anatomy7. Our First Paper, on Cat Cortex, 19598. Recordings from Fibers in the Monkey Optic Nerve9. Recordings from Cells in the Cat Lateral Geniculate10. Our Major Paper on Cat Striate Cortex, 196211. Recordings from the Cat Prestriate Areas, 18 and 1912. Survey of the Monkey Lateral Geniculate Body—A Foray into Color13. Recording Fibers in the Cat Corpus Collosum14. Recordings in Monkey Striate Cortex, 196815. Another Visual Representation, the Cat Clare-Bishop Area16 Encoding of Binocular Depth in a Cortical Area in the Monkey. 17. Anatomy of the Geniculo-cortical Pathway: The Nauta Method18. Ocular Dominance Columns Revealed by Autoradiography19. Regular Sequences of Orientation Shifts in Monkeys20. Cortical Modules and Magnification in MonkeysPart IV. Deprivation and Development21. The First Three Kitten Deprivation Papers22. The Second Group of Deprivation Papers23. The Siamese Cat24. Cells Grouped in Orientation Columns in Newborn Monkeys25. Plasticity and Development of Monkeys Ocular Dominance ColumnsPart V. Three Reviews26. Ferrier Lecture, 197727. Nobel Lecture, David H. Hubel, 1981Nobel Lecture, Torsten N. Wiesel, 198128. Epilogue: Summing UpList of Papers IncludedGlossaryIndexToday, Forty-six Years After StartingTorsten WieselDavid Hubel

Editorial Reviews

"Hubel and Wiesel's contributions to visual neurophysiology are truly staggering. The book is impressive in providing organization to the sheer mass of data and theories that emerged from the individual journal of articles." —PsycCRITIQUES

". . . The entire book is an inspiration to read. The original papers and the additional chapters are beautifully written . . . Read today, some 50 years after the initial work was published, the papers still retain their freshness and their capacity to arouse wonder, not only at the way in which nature has elaborated such an impressive organ, but also at the tenacity and the powerful conceptual thinking that was behind their collected work . . . Neuroscience should rejoice that, during a mere 25 years, its world was enriched not only by a wealth of knowledge but also by new standards of evidence and elegance of methodology which have left a permanent imprint." —Semir Zeki in Brain

"The book's glory is that the commentaries sandwiching each paper illuminate the workings of one of the most productive collaborations in the history of biology. Hubel and Wiesel describe the joy of mom-and-pop science where the collaborators do the work and weigh what to do next . . . the book brings their work all together—complete with the authors' retrospective evaluations of their work . . . a gem in the history of the field and a core resource . . ." —Robert Wurtz in Science

Advance Praise for Brain and Visual Perception

"For those who came of age admiring the scientific adventures of Hubel and Wiesel, this book is an opportunity to look back and wonder. For those who came after, it will be an inspiration. This is a marvel of a book, written in David Hubel's disarmingly engaging voice, a must have, a must read."—A. Damasio, neuroscientist and author of Descartes' Error and Looking for Spinoza

"David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's book describes the wonderful period in neurophysiology when they worked on the early mammalian visual system. I found it fascinating reading."—Francis Crick, Nobel Laureate and author of The Astonishing Hypothesis

"A rare opportunity to peek into the minds of two giants of twentieth century science - David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. Each of their classic papers reads like a Sherlock Holmes novel, but the accompanying commentaries and autobiographies, packed with witty, whimsical asides and Hubelisms, bring out the human side of science - reminding us that great science is a judicious blend of intuition, imagination and sheer tenacity rather than a cold rational process of the kind one usually associates with Holmes. It's especially refreshing to see their low-tech approach in an era of high-tech 'big science' dominated by brain imaging and gee whiz neophrenology."—V.S. Ramachandran, BBC Reith Lecturer for 2003 and author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness

"Brain and Visual Perception is an elegantly presented and well-organized collection of critical and important papers from the 25-year collaboration of Hubel and Wiesel. This is a valuable volume. Scientists will want it because, whether or not you like the commentaries, you have to admit that they are fascinating reading in themselves." —Nature Neuroscience

"Hubel and Wiesel, as much as any other scientists, are responsible for our current view of the brain, its function, and how it is molded by the environment. This book will provide students and established scientists alike insight into the roots of modern neuroscience, a view into one of the most productive collaborations in the field, and some of the best examples of scientific writing in the literature."—David Ferster, Professor of Neurobiology and Physiology, Northwestern University

"Beginning around 1960, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel took the study of the brain and its development from the realm of philosophy to biology. These papers and the commentaries that accompany them put the reader inside the heads of the scientists who gave us out modern understanding of the cerebral cortex, often by asking the next logical question, but always with appreciation for the beauty of the system."—Michael P. Stryker, W.F. Ganong Professor of Physiology, University of California, San Francisco

"The book is much more than just a catalogue of papers, starting with the biographies of the two Nobel Prize Winners and four chapters on the research background at the time. These chapters are in themselves fascinating and outline the pivotal role played in the development of their research by Steve Kuffler as well as the other major figures in neurophysiology."—Physiology News

From the Publisher