As a child, Doris Tsao spent long hours musing on the mechanics and philosophy of vision with her father, who owns a company that designs artificial vision systems. "He made vision seem like the greatest scientific problem," she says. By the time Tsao was 11 or 12, she'd been hit by "the realization that your sense of vision is created by your brain" - and her fate as a brain researcher was sealed.
Tsao studied biology and math as an undergraduate at the California Institute of Technology, and in 1996 began her doctorate at Harvard Medical School, working on stereopsis (depth perception) with vision neuroscientist Margaret Livingstone. Researchers were just beginning to use functional MRI to study maps of human brain activation, and Livingstone sent Tsao to Massachusetts General Hospital to work with fMRI expert Roger Tootell and establish the technique in monkeys. Tsao thought she could also electrophysiologically probe ...
