NOBEL FOUNDATIONDavid Hubel, who shared half the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his collaborator Torsten Wiesel for their work on visual information processing, died September 22 of kidney failure. He was 87.
Hubel’s work focused on understanding how the neurons of the retina communicate visual information to the brain. When he and his collaborator Torsten Wiesel began to examine the visual system in the 1950s, it was believed that the eyes projected visual images directly onto the cortex, as a movie is projected onto a screen. But Hubel and Wiesel demonstrated that visual images perceived by the retina are first transformed into code and then transmitted to the brain, which interprets that code to recreate the images. For this discovery and for later demonstrating that an early critical period exists for establishing retinal communication with the brain, Hubel and Wiesel became Nobel Laureates in 1981.
According to The New York Times, Hubel and Wiesel’s work revolutionized how ...
