Visual Cortex Quotes

All knowledge or form conception is evoked through the medium of the eye, either in response to disturbances directly received on the retina or to their fainter secondary effects and reverberations. Other sense organs can only call forth feelings which have no reality of existence and of which no conception can be formed.

Of all the senses, sight must be the most delightful.

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

In 1983, I became the Vincent and Brook Astor Professor at The Rockefeller University, where I established a new Laboratory of Neurobiology and continued my close collaboration with Charles Gilbert on the circuitry of primary visual cortex.

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

Innate mechanisms endow the visual system with highly specific connections, but visual experience early in life is necessary for their maintenance and full development. Deprivation experiments demonstrate that neural connections can be modulated by environmental influences during a critical period of postnatal development.

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

I learned in the computer game business early on that all senses are not equal. The best example is, you're listening to a radio play and you're driving down the road, and suddenly you realize you haven't seen the road in five minutes. It's because your visual cortex has been partying with your imagination, basically.

The eye sees what it brings the power to see.

But concerning vision alone is a separate science formed among philosophers, namely, optics, and not concerning any other sense ... It is possible that some other science may be more useful, but no other science has so much sweetness and beauty of utility. Therefore it is the flower of the whole of philosophy and through it, and not without it, can the other sciences be known.

The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately.

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

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.

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?

Visual cortex is fundamentally a machine whose job is to generate a model of the world.

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.

Animal vision - including human vision - is so biased toward movement that we don't technically see stationary objects at all.

In the 19th century the anatomy of the eye was known in great detail and the sophisticated mechanisms it employs to deliver an accurate picture of the outside world astounded everyone who was familiar with them.

The outer eyes see only by reflection. The vibrationsfrom the inner eye, optic, is conveyed along the opticnerves and produced, spectacular, on the ether.

The cooperation of the two retina in one field of vision, whatever is its cause, must rather be the source of all the ideas to which single or double vision may give rise.

Folded eyes see brighter colors than the open ever do.

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

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 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.

I studied neuroscience at the cellular level, so I was looking at learning and memory in the visual cortex of rats. Neuroscience mainly exposed me to a way of thinking - about experimentation, about what you believe to be true and how you could prove it - and how to approach things in a methodical manner.