Torsten Wiesel Quotes

The brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.

The idea of critical windows extends beyond just vision, of course: almost every system in the brain has a critical window when it needs to experience certain stimuli, or it won't get wired up properly. The most obvious example is language: if you don't learn a language early on, it's nigh impossible to become truly fluent.

Animals see a video of the world. If an animal were only to see still images, how would its vision develop? Neuroscientists have run experiments in cats in a dark environment with a strobe so it can only see still images - and those cats' visual systems actually underdevelop. So motion is important, but what is the algorithm?

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.

Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.

The fruit flies we work with have the equivalent of about a 25 by 25 pixel camera. But that camera is very, very fast, about 10 times faster than the human visual system.

We think of our eyes as video cameras and our brains as blank tapes to be filled with sensory inputs.

I often avoid using the terms 'figuration' and 'abstraction' because I've always tried to have it both ways. I want the experience of looking at one of my paintings to be similar to the process of making the painting - you go from the big picture to something very intense and detailed, and then back again.

Magic's about understanding - and then manipulating - how viewers digest the sensory information.

Experiencing this film in 2-D is only getting about 20 percent of the experience of 'Gravity.'

The eye is the most refined of our senses, the one which communicates most directly with our mind, our consciousness.

The whole world, as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of color.

Color is an intense experience on its own.

The actual organization of behavior goes on the level of the individual nerve cells and their connections, and we have a hundred billion nerve cells, probably a hundred trillion connections. It's just mind-boggling to think of all the different ways in which they're arranged in a baby's head.

Thus there is no doubt the eye was intended for us to see with.

We are not born with effective vision. The human infant has to learn how to see. The eyes gather information, they transmit it to the brain, but the brain doesn't know how to process it yet. We learn how to see in a way that's very similar to the way we learn how to speak. It takes a couple of years.

Everybody thinks they know what art should be. But very few of them have the sense that is necessary to experience painting, that is the sense of sight, that sees colors and forms as living reality in the picture.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

Psychology is still trying to explain the perception of the position of an object in space, along with its shape, size, and so on, and to understand the sensations of color.

The eye of a human being is a microscope, which makes the world seem bigger than it really is.

When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.

It is exceedingly improbable that the identical action of the corresponding parts of the two retina is the result of a certain habituation, or of the influence of the mind.

Just as there is no substitute for original works of art, there is no substitute for the world of direct sensual experience.

The first six years of a child's life, it is like a tape recorder is on. Everything it sees, smells, touches, experiences in any way, whatever it hears, is being downloaded into the brain before the consciousness of the child is even made apparent.

At Oculus, we're now looking at eye specialists, people who really understand how the human eye works, and how that affects human emotion.