7. The visual system: Hubel and Wiesel redux

I don’t think many neuroscientists would dispute the statement that the work David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel began in the late 1950s and continued for the next 25 years provided the greatest single influence on the ways neuroscientists thought about and prosecuted studies of the brain during much of the second half of the twentieth century. Certainly, what they were doing had never been very far from my own thinking, even while working on the formation and maintenance of synaptic connections in the peripheral nervous system. To explain the impact of their work and to set the stage for understanding the issues discussed in the remaining chapters, I need to fill in more information about the visual system, what Hubel and Wiesel actually did, ....