Pioneers of cortical plasticity: six classic papers by Wiesel and Hubel.

摘要

the following sentence opens Torsten Wiesel, s 1981 Nobel Lecture: "In the early sixties, having begun to describe the physiology of cells in the adult cat visual cortex.-David Hubel and I decided to investigate how the highly specific response properties of cortical cells emerged during postnatal development" (http:/obelprize orgobel_prizes/medicrne/laureates/1981/ wiesel-lecturehtml) This modest statement belies the tidal wave of experiments on developmental brain plasticity that was initiated by their publications in 1963, continues to this day, and extends well beyond the occipital lobe to virtually all sensory areas, motor areas, and to "higher centers" involved in learning, memory, and decision making, To be sure, many great experimentalists and philosophers dealt with the issue of nature versus nurture in brain development before them (see Lehrman 1970), but Wiesel and Hubel were the first to recognize that their high-resolution, single-neuron analyses of visual response properties in cat cortex (Hubel and Wiesel 1962, 1963a) provided a powerful approach to deciphering how much of sensory feature extraction was fixed at birth and how much depended for its appearance on environment-introduced visual activity.