So let's begin by talking about

vision as a feature detection and

I would say, I think fairly that this if
you ask visionaire scientists today on how
vision works, this is probably the main
idea that you would en, en, encounter.
So I showed you this photograph last time,
but I didn't say much about it.
So let me explain it to
you in a bit more detail.
This is Steven Kuffler, who came
to Harvard Medical School in 1959,
and is seen by many or viewed by many.
Is considered by many the father of modern
neurobiology departments
in medical schools.
His was virtually the first, and
he brought with him from John Hopkins,
two post doctorate fellows who've
been his collaborators there.
David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel.
They began what they refer to in this book
title as a 25 Year Collaboration which is
of course, you know,
the historical duration of
the time they work [INAUDIBLE] together
on Brain and Visual Perception.
This picture is a cover from
a book that summarizes their work.
Dating from the late 1950s
until the early 1980s.
The book was actually published in 2005 by
Archer University Press and it relates.
The work they did in
really a remarkable way.
The works remarkable and
the way they relayed it is remarkable.
It's a collection of their seminal
papers over this period of 25 years.
But it's also accompanied
by afterwards and
forwards that introduce
each of the topics.
They worked on that say a lot about
how science was done in those days.
How it's done differently today.
And I tell students often
that if there was only
one book they could take with them
to a desert island to consume in in.
Really in all of neuroscience,
this would be my recommendation.
So, let's look at what they did,
at least what they did,
they did many things and
won a Nobel prize in 1981 for this work,
but The part of their work that is
most pertinent to what we're talking
about today, a sort of a standard way of
thinking, it's led to a standard way of

thinking, about the generation of visual

perceptions, is illustrated here.
So here is an experimental
animal they started.
Or with a cat.
The cat's anesthetized.
And in front of the cat is a screen.
And on the screen are presented stimuli.
And what they did was to devise a way
of recording from individual neurons,
individual cortex.
And even though the animal is
anesthetized, what's apparent in this way
is that depending on the receptive
field of the neuronal that's being
recorded from, you remember the idea of
the receptive field is that there's only
going to be one place on this screen
with activate any particular neuron.
And moreover that the neuron is
going to have particular properties.
That it responds to.
And in this case, the property we're
considering is the orientation of the line
on the screen, so this line is
oriented obliquely, as drawn here.
And here,
in the stimulus orientation column,
is shown a series of presentations
of the stimulus on the screen.
As the orientation of the angle of
that bar of light in a darkened room
is changed from horizontal to vertical and
back.
The oblique angles to horizontal.
And here in this column are the responses,
the spikes as they called or
actual potentials that the neuron
generates and response to the stimulus.
And what's critical here is noting
that in some orientations for
this cell, the orientation that
causes the best response is vertical.
So which one of these lines
is an action potential,
a response on the cell is
being recorded from, and
the cell fires vigorously in response
to vertical stimulus but not
at all to horizontal stimulus and
progressively less to stimuli that are.
Oriented obliquely, so
of course this is just one example, and
other cells that they would require from
from there primary visual cortex would
respond to a greater or lesser degree to
all of the possible orientations
of the stimulus on the screen.
So you have vertically sensitive cells,
horizontally sensitive cells,

obliquely sensitive cells.

And so on, and this diagram here is a so
called tuning curve
that shows, the activity of the cell
in relation to orientation on the,
on the horizontal access
measured as in terms of.
Number of actual difference
generated per unit of time.
And the upshot of all this, and
it certainly is a compelling idea,
is that neuronal activity
that a neuron and
of course there are millions of neurons
in the prime membership cortex.
Represents image features.
In this case, the feature being
the orientation of, of, of the line.
And the concept that
derives from that is that,
the features in the image orientation.
And of course, there's many features
in the image spectral qualities.
The luminance.
Spectral qualities leading to color,
the luminance leading to the perception of
lightness that we'll talk about next time.
And many other properties.
color, motion.
You name it.
That all
the visual qualities that we are aware of.
Generally in this way buy cells
whose few properties to detect those
qualities and represent them and
report them to this representation in
usual brain to our conscious awareness.
Well this is something.
Odd, about this, this book that
I call your attention to, and
that is that although the title
of the book is Brain and
Visual Perception, there's really very
little about perception in this book,
in fact there's hardly anything
about perception in this book.
There's no entry in the glossary,
there's no definition.
For [COUGH] there's no entry in
the index for the word perception.
And this seems strange.
It's, it's you know,
after the title of this book.
Why is that?
Well there's a good reason for it ,and
the reason is that for Hubel and Wiesel.
And I think, again, as I said for the
majority of vision scientists even today,
a perception should simply
fall out of the physiology and

anatomy of the visual

brain characteristics.
And those are, of course, characteristics
that by, Many, many recordings first in
cats, and then a monkeys that
I just described to you.
Those data really compelling evidence
that, detecting features and
images and reporting them, representing
human brain and responding to them.
Is probably the way vision works.
Well, there's something wrong with
that idea at least in, in my opinion.
And of course there's
nothing wrong with the work.
This is really magisterial work,
the seminal work that was done in
the last 50 years in vision this.
As I think I mentioned earlier, really
guided people's thinking about this over
the last 50 years and
right up until the present day.
But there is a problem with the idea of
feature detection, as commonly expressed.
And that is that the features.
Of images, are not measures
of the things in the world.
So remember that,
we have to behave in the world.
We have to behave,
accurately with respect,
to the reality, of the orientation
of objects in the world.
Their movements.
Their intensities, in terms of what's
conveyed to the eye by, by photons.
Their colors, as conveyed by
the spectrum distribution, and so on.
And, you'll remember
from what I said earlier.
That this is not really possible.
And, the, the.
Evidence for that with respect
to orientation is shown here.
So here is the orientation on the retina,
but that orientation is being
produced by a variety of different
orientations in the real, real world.
That can be produced by, a vertical
orientation in three dimensional space,
a,uh, an oblique rep orientation in three
dimensional space or anything else.
So, how's the observer to know
what they need to respond to
with the appropriate behavior.
If the image on the retina
doesn't really reveal
the orientation on real world
objects in the putting three dimensional
space that we have to behavior.