David H. Hubel
Encyclopedia
David Hunter Hubel is the John Franklin Enders
Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School
. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel
of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system
; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres. In 1978,
Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
from Columbia University
.
into the primary visual cortex of an anesthetized cat. They then projected patterns of light and dark on a screen in front of the cat. They found that some neuron
s fired rapidly when presented with lines at one angle, while others responded best to another angle. Some of these neurons responded differently to light patterns than to dark patterns. Hubel and Wiesel called these neurons simple cell
s."
Still other neurons, which they termed complex cell
s, detected edges regardless of where they were placed in the receptive field of the neuron and could preferentially detect motion in certain directions. These studies showed how the visual system constructs complex representations of visual information from simple stimulus features.
Hubel and Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for two major contributions: 1. their work on development of the visual system, which involved a description of ocular dominance column
s in the 1960s and 1970s; and 2. their work establishing a foundation for visual neurophysiology, describing how signals from the eye are processed by the brain to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors and color detectors, building blocks of the visual scene. By depriving kittens from using one eye, they showed that columns in the primary visual cortex receiving inputs from the other eye took over the areas that would normally receive input from the deprived eye. This has important implications for the understanding of deprivation amblyopia
, a type of visual loss due to unilateral visual deprivation during the so-called critical period
. These kittens also did not develop areas receiving input from both eyes, a feature needed for binocular vision
. Hubel and Wiesel's experiments showed that the ocular dominance develops irreversibly early in childhood development. These studies opened the door for the understanding and treatment of childhood cataract
s and strabismus
. They were also important in the study of cortical plasticity
. Furthermore, the understanding of sensory processing in animals served as inspiration for the SIFT
descriptor (Lowe, 1999), which is a local feature used in computer vision
for tasks such as object recognition
and wide-baseline matching, etc. The SIFT
descriptor is arguably the most widely used feature type for these tasks.
to American parents in 1926. His paternal grandfather emigrated as a child to the U.S.A. from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen
. In 1929, his family moved to Montreal
where he spent his formative years. From age six to eighteen, he attended Strathcona Academy in Outremont, Quebec about which he said, "[I owe] much to the excellent teachers there, especially to Julia Bradshaw, a dedicated, vivacious history teacher with a memorable Irish temper, who awakened me to the possibility of learning how to write readable English." He studied mathematics
and physics
at McGill University
, and then entered medical school there. In 1954, he moved to the United States
to work at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an assistant resident in Neurology. He was later drafted
by the army and served at Walter Reed Hospital. There, he began recording from the primary visual cortex of sleeping and awake cats. At Walter Reed, he invented the modern metal microelectrode out of Stoner-Mudge lacquer and tungsten, and the modern hydraulic microdrive, for which he had to learn rudimentary machinists skills to produce. In 1958, he moved to Johns Hopkins and began his collaborations with Wiesel, and discovered orientation selectivity and columnar organization in visual cortex. One year later, he joined the faculty of Harvard University
.
John Franklin Enders
John Franklin Enders was an American medical scientist and Nobel laureate. Enders had been called "The Father of Modern Vaccines."-Life:...
Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School is the graduate medical school of Harvard University. It is located in the Longwood Medical Area of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts....
. He was co-recipient with Torsten Wiesel
Torsten Wiesel
Torsten Nils Wiesel was a Swedish co-recipient with David H. Hubel of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system; the prize was shared with Roger W...
of the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine administered by the Nobel Foundation, is awarded once a year for outstanding discoveries in the field of life science and medicine. It is one of five Nobel Prizes established in 1895 by Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, in his will...
, for their discoveries concerning information processing in the visual system
Visual system
The visual system is the part of the central nervous system which enables organisms to process visual detail, as well as enabling several non-image forming photoresponse functions. It interprets information from visible light to build a representation of the surrounding world...
; the prize was shared with Roger W. Sperry for his independent research on the cerebral hemispheres. In 1978,
Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize
Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize for Biology or Biochemistry is an annual prize awarded by Columbia University to a researcher or group of researchers that have made an outstanding contribution in basic research in the fields of biology or biochemistry....
from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
.
Research
The Hubel and Wiesel experiments greatly expanded the scientific knowledge of sensory processing. In one experiment, done in 1959, they inserted a microelectrodeElectrode
An electrode is an electrical conductor used to make contact with a nonmetallic part of a circuit...
into the primary visual cortex of an anesthetized cat. They then projected patterns of light and dark on a screen in front of the cat. They found that some neuron
Neuron
A neuron is an electrically excitable cell that processes and transmits information by electrical and chemical signaling. Chemical signaling occurs via synapses, specialized connections with other cells. Neurons connect to each other to form networks. Neurons are the core components of the nervous...
s fired rapidly when presented with lines at one angle, while others responded best to another angle. Some of these neurons responded differently to light patterns than to dark patterns. Hubel and Wiesel called these neurons simple cell
Simple cell
A simple cell in the primary visual cortex is a cell that responds primarily to oriented edges and gratings . These cells were discovered by Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel in the late 1950s ....
s."
Still other neurons, which they termed complex cell
Complex cell
Complex cells can be found in the primary visual cortex , the secondary visual cortex , and Brodmann area 19 .Like a simple cell, a complex cell will respond primarily to oriented edges and gratings, however it has a degree of spatial invariance. This means that its receptive field cannot be...
s, detected edges regardless of where they were placed in the receptive field of the neuron and could preferentially detect motion in certain directions. These studies showed how the visual system constructs complex representations of visual information from simple stimulus features.
Hubel and Wiesel received the Nobel Prize for two major contributions: 1. their work on development of the visual system, which involved a description of ocular dominance column
Ocular dominance column
Ocular dominance columns are stripes of neurons in the visual cortex of certain mammals that respond preferentially to input from one eye or the other. The columns span multiple cortical layers, and are laid out in a striped pattern across the surface of the striate cortex...
s in the 1960s and 1970s; and 2. their work establishing a foundation for visual neurophysiology, describing how signals from the eye are processed by the brain to generate edge detectors, motion detectors, stereoscopic depth detectors and color detectors, building blocks of the visual scene. By depriving kittens from using one eye, they showed that columns in the primary visual cortex receiving inputs from the other eye took over the areas that would normally receive input from the deprived eye. This has important implications for the understanding of deprivation amblyopia
Amblyopia
Amblyopia, also known as lazy eye, is a disorder of the visual system that is characterized by a vision deficiency in an eye that is otherwise physically normal, or out of proportion to associated structural abnormalities of the eye...
, a type of visual loss due to unilateral visual deprivation during the so-called critical period
Critical period
This article is about a critical period in an organism's or person's development. See also America's Critical Period.In general, a critical period is a limited time in which an event can occur, usually to result in some kind of transformation...
. These kittens also did not develop areas receiving input from both eyes, a feature needed for binocular vision
Binocular vision
Binocular vision is vision in which both eyes are used together. The word binocular comes from two Latin roots, bini for double, and oculus for eye. Having two eyes confers at least four advantages over having one. First, it gives a creature a spare eye in case one is damaged. Second, it gives a...
. Hubel and Wiesel's experiments showed that the ocular dominance develops irreversibly early in childhood development. These studies opened the door for the understanding and treatment of childhood cataract
Cataract
A cataract is a clouding that develops in the crystalline lens of the eye or in its envelope, varying in degree from slight to complete opacity and obstructing the passage of light...
s and strabismus
Strabismus
Strabismus is a condition in which the eyes are not properly aligned with each other. It typically involves a lack of coordination between the extraocular muscles, which prevents bringing the gaze of each eye to the same point in space and preventing proper binocular vision, which may adversely...
. They were also important in the study of cortical plasticity
Neuroplasticity
Neuroplasticity is a non-specific neuroscience term referring to the ability of the brain and nervous system in all species to change structurally and functionally as a result of input from the environment. Plasticity occurs on a variety of levels, ranging from cellular changes involved in...
. Furthermore, the understanding of sensory processing in animals served as inspiration for the SIFT
Scale-invariant feature transform
Scale-invariant feature transform is an algorithm in computer vision to detect and describe local features in images. The algorithm was published by David Lowe in 1999....
descriptor (Lowe, 1999), which is a local feature used in computer vision
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...
for tasks such as object recognition
Object recognition
Object recognition in computer vision is the task of finding a given object in an image or video sequence. Humans recognize a multitude of objects in images with little effort, despite the fact that the image of the objects may vary somewhat in different view points, in many different sizes / scale...
and wide-baseline matching, etc. The SIFT
Scale-invariant feature transform
Scale-invariant feature transform is an algorithm in computer vision to detect and describe local features in images. The algorithm was published by David Lowe in 1999....
descriptor is arguably the most widely used feature type for these tasks.
Biography
Hubel was born in Windsor, OntarioWindsor, Ontario
Windsor is the southernmost city in Canada and is located in Southwestern Ontario at the western end of the heavily populated Quebec City – Windsor Corridor. It is within Essex County, Ontario, although administratively separated from the county government. Separated by the Detroit River, Windsor...
to American parents in 1926. His paternal grandfather emigrated as a child to the U.S.A. from the Bavarian town of Nördlingen
Nördlingen
Nördlingen is a town in the Donau-Ries district, in Bavaria, Germany, with a population of 20,000. It is located in the middle of a complex meteorite crater, called the Nördlinger Ries. The town was also the place of two battles during the Thirty Years' War...
. In 1929, his family moved to Montreal
Montreal
Montreal is a city in Canada. It is the largest city in the province of Quebec, the second-largest city in Canada and the seventh largest in North America...
where he spent his formative years. From age six to eighteen, he attended Strathcona Academy in Outremont, Quebec about which he said, "[I owe] much to the excellent teachers there, especially to Julia Bradshaw, a dedicated, vivacious history teacher with a memorable Irish temper, who awakened me to the possibility of learning how to write readable English." He studied mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
and physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
at McGill University
McGill University
Mohammed Fathy is a public research university located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university bears the name of James McGill, a prominent Montreal merchant from Glasgow, Scotland, whose bequest formed the beginning of the university...
, and then entered medical school there. In 1954, he moved to the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
to work at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine as an assistant resident in Neurology. He was later drafted
Conscription
Conscription is the compulsory enlistment of people in some sort of national service, most often military service. Conscription dates back to antiquity and continues in some countries to the present day under various names...
by the army and served at Walter Reed Hospital. There, he began recording from the primary visual cortex of sleeping and awake cats. At Walter Reed, he invented the modern metal microelectrode out of Stoner-Mudge lacquer and tungsten, and the modern hydraulic microdrive, for which he had to learn rudimentary machinists skills to produce. In 1958, he moved to Johns Hopkins and began his collaborations with Wiesel, and discovered orientation selectivity and columnar organization in visual cortex. One year later, he joined the faculty of Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
.
Publications
- Hubel, D. H. & T. N. Wiesel, Receptive Fields Of Single Neurones In The Cat's Striate Cortex, Journal of Physiology, (I959) I48, 574-59I.
- Hubel, D. H. & T. N. Wiesel. Receptive Fields, Binocular Interaction And Functional Architecture In The Cat's Visual Cortex, Journal of Physiology, (1962), 160, pp. 106–154, With 2 plates and 20 text-figures.