torsten wiesel experiments

Torsten Wiesel (1924– )

Torsten Nils Wiesel studied visual information processing and development in the US during the twentieth century. He performed multiple experiments on cats in which he sewed one of their eyes shut and monitored the response of the cat’s visual system after opening the sutured eye. For his work on visual processing, Wiesel received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981 along with David Hubel and Roger Sperry. Wiesel determined the critical period during which the visual system of a mammal develops and studied how impairment at that stage of development can cause permanent damage to the neural pathways of the eye, allowing later researchers and surgeons to study the treatment of congenital vision disorders.

Wiesel was born on 3 June 1924 in Uppsala, Sweden, to Anna-Lisa Bentzer Wiesel and Fritz Wiesel as their fifth and youngest child. Wiesel’s mother stayed at home and raised their children. His father was the head of and chief psychiatrist at a mental institution, Beckomberga Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, where the family lived. Wiesel described himself as lazy and playful during his childhood. He went to Whitlockska Samskolan, a coeducational private school in Stockholm, Sweden. At that time, Wiesel was interested in sports and became the president of his high school’s athletic association, which he described as his only achievement from his younger years.

In 1941, at the age of seventeen, Wiesel enrolled at Karolinska Institutet (Royal Caroline Institute) in Solna, Sweden, where he pursued a medical degree and later pursued his own research. Wiesel stated that he became interested in psychiatry due to his father’s position at Beckomberga Hospital, and he worked at multiple mental hospitals during one year of his medical studies. According to Wiesel, his professors Carl Gustaf Bernhard and Rudolf Skoglund influenced his later interest in neurophysiology. In 1954, Wiesel obtained his medical degree and joined Bernhard’s laboratory to do vision neurophysiology research. That year he also worked for the physiology department of Karolinska Intitutet and the child psychiatry ward.

In 1955, Wiesel accepted a postdoctoral fellowship position in Stephen Kuffler’s Wilmer Institute laboratory at John Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, Maryland. Kuffler’s lab studied vision development in mammals and focused on differences in development between mammals and non-mammals. Wiesel and the Kuffler lab largely studied cats and their retina ganglion cells, the inner cells of the retina that receive visual information from photoreceptors in the eyes. While in Kuffler’s lab, Wiesel completed an ophthalmology fellowship and studied the receptive fields of cat’s retinal ganglion cells. Wiesel and Kuffler’s study extended the work of 1967 Nobel Prize winners Haldan Keffer Hartline and Ragnar Granit by studying on-center and off-center receptive fields, which are mutually exclusive parts of the retina that have an on- center and off- periphery or vice versa. On-center cells can sense stimuli that off cells cannot and vice versa. In 1956, Wiesel was appointed associate professor at John Hopkins Medical School.

Wiesel began studying the origin of visual perception in 1958 with David Hubel, a researcher who had joined the Kuffler lab that same year. Wiesel and Hubel knew that the visual cortex of the brain, which is located on the back of the brain in the occipital lobe, is responsible for visual perception, yet they did not exactly know how that happened. Wiesel and Hubel moved to Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1959 with the rest of Kuffler’s lab. That lab later formed Harvard Medical School’s Department of Neurobiology.

At Harvard, Wiesel and Hubel studied the visual cortex of the brain by monitoring the difference in activity between its cells. They questioned whether cortical cells, or the cells of the visual cortex, responded similarly to both eyes or whether they were dominated by one eye. The researchers also wanted to know what brightness and patterns of light are best recognized by the majority of cortical cells. Wiesel and Hubel inserted an electrode into the visual cortex of anesthetized cats that detected electrochemical changes in the cat’s brain. Most cortical cells responded better to bright spots of light and lines of light shown at an angle. The study helped them see that any complex image is processed by multiple consecutive stimuli in the visual cortex.

As Wiesel and Hubel continued their research on cats at Harvard, they determined how cells are situated in the visual cortex and what the function of each of those cells is. They found that the visual cortex consists of ocular dominance columns that are stripes of neurons that respond greater to one of the eyes. The cells in those columns lie in multiple layers and span the entire visual cortex of the brain. Wiesel and Hubel discovered that the major difference between cortical cells is the amount of information they can process. Some cortical cells were simple, some were complex, and some were hypercomplex, meaning they could process increasing amounts of information from the eyes. Wiesel and Hubel also found that there were three major pathways of processing visual information, depending on whether the cortical cells were detecting movement, shape, or color. Furthermore, Wiesel and Hubel found that the cells responsible for all three of those functions were different and were located in different areas of the retina, as well as different areas of the visual cortex. Movement sensitive cells were unable to distinguish colors and the color sensitive cells were unable to distinguish movement. The major photoreceptor cells located in the back of the retina detect color because they are connected in a way that allows for light differentiation. Wiesel and Hubel published their findings in “Receptive Fields of Single Neurons in the Cat’s Striate Cortex” in 1960.

During the 1960s, Wiesel and Hubel studied the development of kitten’s visual system as a model for human children’s visual system at Harvard Medical School. They questioned whether congenital vision impairments, even if corrected, could cause permanent damage to vision. Multiple vision studies had already prevented kittens from seeing light during the first months after birth, but no study before had sutured their eyes fully shut for a prolonged period of time, which made kittens completely blind in the sutured eye until it was reopened. Wiesel and Hubel hypothesized that the visual system develops during the first months of life and that a visual impairment during the developmental stage could cause irreversible damage. The first place they looked for such damage was the visual cortex of the brain, or the final step in the information pathway from the eye to the brain.

Wiesel and Hubel tested their hypothesis about the possible effects of congenital vision impairment on kittens by sewing one of a kitten’s eyes shut and later reopening that eye. The researchers then compared the electrical activity of the cortical cells in kittens that had one eye sewed shut to normal kittens of the same age. Wiesel and Hubel had previously noted that different cortical cells respond preferentially to one eye over the other, yet in normal kittens with no previous vision impairment, the majority of cortical cells reacted the same to both eyes. That suggested that in normal mammals, the majority of cortical cells respond the same way to both eyes, and that the distribution of cortical cells in normal kittens could be used as a baseline for calculating how much impairing an eye during early development affects cortical cell distribution.

Upon opening the sutured eye after the first three months of the kitten’s life, Hubel and Wiesel noted that a very small number of cortical cells reacted to the retinal cells of the formerly sutured eye, whereas an abnormally high number of cortical cells reacted to the other eye that had normal vision. That result indicated that the kitten’s cortical neuron preference was redistributed while one of the kitten’s eyes was sutured. In other words, the normal eye compensated for the previously sutured eye, which caused the redistribution of the cortical neurons. Cortical cells responded preferentially to the normal eye because the cortical cells had received no visual information from the sutured eye during development.

Hubel and Wiesel repeated the same experiment with adult cats, but the results were significantly different. They sutured one eye of adult cats for a year. Upon opening the eye, no significant difference in response to stimuli or ocular dominance column size was recorded. That suggested that the mammalian visual system developed during the first few months of the life, and that once it developed, even prolonged impairments did not cause significant damage to neural pathways after the impairments were corrected. However, any impairment to the eye while the visual system was developing post-birth impacted the distribution of cortical neurons, causing irreversible loss of vision in the impaired eye.

Wiesel and Hubel applied their conclusions to humans, which helped surgeons recognize the critical period during which the vision impairments need to be corrected after birth. The critical period was defined as the time during which the visual system develops and the cortical neurons distribute between ocular dominance columns. The critical period is especially important to children with congenital cataracts, or cloudiness of the lens of the eye present at birth, which causes blurry vision. Most children with congenital cataracts were operated months or even years after birth, and the blurry vision in the affected eye could never be fully corrected because the critical period had passed. If an impairment was not surgically corrected during the critical period of visual system development, the visual system would develop for only one eye, and the other would be left impaired for the rest of the human’s life. As of 2017, surgeons operate on congenital cataracts more quickly, minimizing the risk of permanent visual impairment. Wiesel and Hubel published their findings in 1964 in an article titled “Effects of monocular deprivation in kittens.”

During the same year, in 1964, Wiesel was appointed professor of physiology at Harvard, where he stayed until 1983. In 1973, Wiesel became the chairman of the Harvard Physiology Department. In 1981, Wiesel and Hubel won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their research on how visual information is transmitted and processed by the brain. They shared half of the prize with Roger Sperry, who studied the difference in specialization of the two hemispheres of the brain after cutting the corpus callosum, or the bond between the hemispheres in the middle of the brain. Just two years after winning the Nobel Prize, Wiesel moved to Rockefeller University in New York, New York. There he was appointed head of the Laboratory of Neurobiology. As of 2017, Wiesel still works at Rockefeller University.

Wiesel has been married four times. His first marriage was with Teeri Stenhammarand, whom he married in 1956 and divorced in 1970. He married his second wife, Ann Yee, three years later. The two had a daughter, Sara Elizabeth Wiesel, who was born in 1975. That same year, Wiesel divorced Yee. He was then married to Jean Stein from 1995 to 2007. In 2008, Wiesel married Lizette Mususa Reyes, who is his current spouse.

In 1991, Wiesel became the president of Rockefeller University. During his time as president of the university, Wiesel advocated for human rights and equality. He addressed the gender inequality at Rockefeller University by appointing the first female full professor. He also established six new interdisciplinary research centers that helped to expand the research faculty at Rockefeller University. In 1996, Wiesel received the Helen Keller Prize for Vision Research.

In 1998, Wiesel retired from his presidency of Rockefeller University and became the director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior at Rockefeller University. Wiesel also helped found the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies, which promotes equality within the scientific community and encourages the exchange of ideas. Wiesel also founded the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization, which promotes scientific research and collaboration in the Middle East and especially between Israel and Palestine.

Wiesel received a total of twenty scientific awards throughout his career, including his Nobel Prize in 1981 for his discovery of the critical period in visual system development as well as research on visual information processing by the visual cortex of the brain. Due to Wiesel’s discoveries, surgeons can operate on congenital cataracts as soon as they are recognized in a child to avoid further impairment of that eye. As of 2016, Wiesel is active in the global human rights movement. He is also the co-director of the Shelby White and Leon Levy Center for Mind, Brain, and Behavior at Rockefeller University.

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• Gilbert, Charles, and Torsten Wiesel. "Receptive field dynamics in adult primary visual cortex." Nature 356 (1992): 150.
• Granit, Ragnar. "Influence of Stimulation of Central Nervous Structures on Muscle Spindles in Cat1." Acta Physiologica 27 (1953): 130–60.
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• Hubel, David, and Torsten Wiesel. "Receptive Fields of Single Neurons in Cats' Striate Complex." Journal of Physiology 148 (1959): 574–91. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1363130/pdf/jphysiol01298-0128.pdf (Accessed July 29, 2017).
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• Hubel, David, and Torsten Wiesel. "The period of susceptibility to the physiological effects of unilateral eye closure in kittens." The Journal of Physiology 206 (1970): 419–36. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1348655/ (Accessed July 29, 2017).
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March 1, 2014

How 1 Scientist Cracked the Brain's Visual Code

An homage to David Hubel, a Nobel Prize–winning neuroscientist

By Susana Martinez-Conde & Stephen L. Macknik

*Editor's Note - Please download PDF to view Illusions . I must admit that what most strongly motivates me ...is sheer curiosity over the workings of the most complicated structure known . —David H. Hubel (1926–2013)

In 1958 neurophysiologist David H. Hubel and his new research partner, Torsten N. Wiesel, were working like dogs to understand how cats see the world. They routinely pulled all-nighters in Stephen Kuffler's laboratory at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University. One of them would insert thin tungsten electrodes into the anesthetized cats' brains, plugging into neurons in area 17—the first region of the cortex that processes visual information. The other would use a modified ophthalmoscope fitted with glass slides to shine different patterns of light into each animal's eyes. The electrodes were connected to a machine that converted any electrical activity in the brain cells into sounds. Hubel and Wiesel listened carefully for signs of rapidly firing neurons.

For a long time they heard little of interest. Why was this so hard? They were eavesdropping on the brain's  visual  system, right?! Surely they should hear robust activity. Neurons in the retina—the light-sensitive tissue at the back of the eyes—readily responded to spots and rings of light. And neurons in the visual thalamus—the part of the brain connected directly to the retina—dutifully reacted to information relayed from the retina. So why wouldn't cortical neurons, just one level up in the visual hierarchy, also respond in kind? It was infuriating. All the more so because other scientists had warned Hubel and Wiesel that this is exactly what would happen. Again and again neurophysiologists like them had tried, and failed, to crack the visual cortex's code.

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But Hubel and Wiesel were relentless. Unraveling the workings of the cortex was critical not only to understanding vision but also to illuminating the very part of the brain that makes us human. The architecture of the cortex looks more or less the same whether you are in the frontal lobe, the auditory temporal lobe or the visual occipital lobe.

One day while conducting their usual experiments, a machine gun barrage of neural impulses surprised them both. Where did that come from? The neuron in question seemed to be teasing them, firing whenever they inserted a new glass slide onto the ophthalmoscope but then falling silent again. Something momentous was happening that they could not yet grasp. Worse, they felt they were running out of time. Often they could only record from the same neuron for just a few minutes, maybe an hour or two, before it died or slipped off the end of the electrode. Fortunately, an explanation struck them like a lightning bolt. Perhaps the neuron was not responding to the patterns of light and shadow made by the slides but rather to the edge of each new slide as it slid into the ophthalmoscope.

Exhilarated, Hubel and Wiesel continued to study the neuron as the hours ticked by. After presenting the brain cell with all kinds of visual patterns—in their previous studies they had tried everything from their own faces to pictures of glamorous female models—they finally concluded that this potentially history-changing neuron responded only to lines and edges that were oriented in specific angles. They could think of no further tests to conduct and looked at the clock. They had been studying the neuron for nine hours straight.

The primary visual cortex's secret fascination with orientation was the first of many groundbreaking discoveries that Hubel and Wiesel coaxed from the brain—for which they won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981. From this original finding, Hubel, Wiesel and others went on to discover cortical neurons that favored other specific attributes of the visual world, such as preference for specific colors, direction of motion, and even specific objects, such as hands and faces.

In memory of our dear friend and mentor, David Hubel, who died in September 2013 at the age of 87, we show some of the most beautiful and interesting perceptual implications of Hubel and Wiesel's initial breakthrough.

The Primary Visual Cortex Also known as area V1 and Brodmann area 17, the primary visual cortex is located in the brain's occipital lobe. The largest of the more than a dozen cortical areas involved in the processing of visual information, Hubel used to describe it as “the size of a credit card.”

The Science Of Orientation Selectivity Hubel and Wiesel found that whereas retinal neurons preferred dots, an otherwise quiescent cortical neuron would respond vigorously if and only if a straight line, oriented at just the right angle (say, 12 o'clock), was swept across the appropriate location on the retina. The graph shows a cortical neuron's responses (in the form of neuronal impulses, also called action potentials) to bars of different orientations. For this particular neuron, a vertically oriented bar elicited the strongest responses. From such findings, Hubel and Wiesel deduced that the higher a neuron is located in the brain's visual pathway—which stretches from the retina to the farthest regions of cortical tissue—the more complex the stimulus it responds to, for example, dots versus lines versus entire shapes. This type of hierarchy turned out to be fundamental to brain organization overall.

The Art Of Orientation Selectivity In the 19th century artists such as Georges Seurat and Camille Pissarro pioneered a new kind of painting called pointillism in which many carefully placed dots of color collectively form an image. Many decades later Norbert Krüger and Florentin Wörgötter created a type of digital art modeled on pointillism. This sunflower ( left ) is an example. Thousands of your orientation-selective visual neurons work in tandem to help your brain form a picture of the flower's contours. A close-up view ( right ) reveals how visual neurons in the cortex extract orientation information from the image. Each symbol represents the region of the image “seen” by one simulated neuron in the primary visual cortex. The color, lines and arrows in each dot represent the preferences of the activated neuron, based on Hubel and Wiesel's discoveries. The outputs of this neuronal network feed into downstream neurons that respond to increasingly complex shapes and eventually “see” the big picture—in this case, a sunflower.

Cortical Physiology in the Art Museum Lines, rectangles and other elongated solid shapes with varying orientations feature prominently in the minimalistic art of Kazimir Malevich ( left ) and Jean Tinguely ( right ). One reason these creations are so arresting, says visual neuroscientist Semir Zeki of University College London, is that they make our primary visual cortical neurons fire like crazy.

An Orientation Illusion Notice that the line gratings on the left are oblique, whereas the line gratings on the right are vertical. Stare at the short horizontal line between the gratings on the left for at least 30 seconds, then quickly move your gaze to the short line between the gratings on the right. Notice that the formerly vertical lines on the right circles now appear to lean. This occurs because different populations of visual cortical neurons are sensitive to different orientations. When your neurons look at oriented lines for a long enough time, the corresponding cortical detectors become less responsive than those that are tuned to different orientations—a process called adaptation.

*Editor's Note - Please download PDF to view Illusions .

Susana Martinez-Conde is a professor of ophthalmology, neurology, and physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, N.Y. She is author of the Prisma Prize–winning Sleights of Mind, along with Stephen Macknik and Sandra Blakeslee, and of Champions of Illusion, along with Stephen Macknik.

Stephen L. Macknik is a professor of opthalmology, neurology, and physiology and pharmacology at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Along with Susana Martinez-Conde and Sandra Blakeslee, he is author of the Prisma Prize-winning Sleights of Mind . Their forthcoming book, Champions of Illusion , will be published by Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

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Torsten Wiesel

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• How Stuff Works - Science - Biography of Torsten Nils Wiesel
• The Nobel Foundation - Biography of Torsten Nils Wiesel

Torsten Wiesel (born June 3, 1924, Uppsala , Sweden) is a Swedish neurobiologist, recipient with David Hunter Hubel and Roger Wolcott Sperry of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine . All three scientists were honoured for their investigations of brain function, Wiesel and Hubel in particular for their collaborative studies of the visual cortex , which is located in the occipital lobes of the cerebrum .

Wiesel earned a medical degree from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm in 1954. After remaining there for a year as an instructor in physiology , he accepted a research appointment at the Johns Hopkins University Medical School in Baltimore , Maryland, where his association with Hubel began. Working with laboratory animals, they analyzed the flow of nerve impulses from the eye to the visual cortex and were thereby able to discern many structural and functional details of that part of the brain. Wiesel and Hubel also studied the effects of various visual impairments in young animals, and their results lent strong support to the view that prompt surgery is imperative in correcting certain eye defects that are detectable in newborn children.

In 1959 Wiesel moved, along with Hubel, to Harvard University , where in 1974 he was named the Robert Winthrop professor of neurobiology. In 1983 Wiesel accepted a position as the Vincent Brook Astor professor of neuroscience at Rockefeller University and formed a collaborative partnership with American neurobiologist Charles Gilbert, who was studying the interactions of neurons in the primary visual cortex. Their studies led to the elucidation of fundamental neuronal connections in the visual cortex and revealed information about the responses of cells in the visual receptive fields. From 1991 to 1998 Wiesel served as president of Rockefeller University and worked to facilitate collaboration efforts among scientists and to create new positions to attract talented researchers. He later served as secretary general (2000–09) of the Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) in Stockholm. Wiesel’s role at the HFSP was concerned primarily with helping young scientists in countries around the world find research and collaboration opportunities.

Wiesel served on the boards of multiple organizations, including the Pew Center on Climate Change, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the International Brain Research Organization. In 2004 he cofounded the Israeli-Palestinian Science Organization to promote scientific collaboration between researchers in Israel and Palestine. Wiesel was an advocate of human rights , having served as the chair of both the International Human Rights Network of Academies and Scholarly Societies and the Committee of Human Rights of the National Academies of Science in the United States . In 2007 Wiesel’s efforts to support research on eye diseases were realized when the Torsten Wiesel Research Institute was established as part of the World Eye Organization, based in Chengdu , China.

In addition to Wiesel’s numerous scientific papers, he wrote several books, including two with Hubel, Brain Mechanisms of Vision (1991) and Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a 25-Year Collaboration (2004). Wiesel received multiple awards during his career, including the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize in 1978 (shared with Hubel) and the U.S. National Medal of Science in 2005.

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• Published: 30 October 2013

David Hunter Hubel (1926–2013)

• Carla J. Shatz 1  

Nature volume  502 ,  page 625 ( 2013 ) Cite this article

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Neuroscientist who helped to reveal how the brain processes visual information.

When David Hunter Hubel died on 22 September, the world lost a great neuroscientist. It also lost a passionate advocate for a style of small-scale research that may still be one of the most powerful ways to make discoveries.

Hubel studied the brain circuitry that underlies vision in collaboration with neurophysiologist Torsten Wiesel. By working on one neuron at a time, the pair gave neuroscientists a new understanding of a cortical circuit that contains millions of neurons and hundreds of millions of connections.

Hubel was born in Windsor, Canada, and grew up in Montreal. His father was a chemical engineer, and, as a boy, Hubel enjoyed tinkering with both electronics and chemistry. In 1947, he graduated from McGill University in Montreal with a bachelor's degree in mathematics and physics. He then took a leap and attended medical school, also at McGill.

Hubel received his doctor of medicine in 1951 and trained as a neurology fellow at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. His studies were briefly interrupted when he was drafted into the US Army. In 1958, neurobiologist Stephen Kuffler invited Hubel to join his lab and work with Wiesel at the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins. Thus began an extraordinary 25-year collaboration. In fact, Hubel and Wiesel worked so closely and published so extensively together that some people thought that they were one person, named Hubel N. Wiesel.

In 1959, Hubel and Wiesel moved with Kuffler to Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. When they started their experiments in the late 1950s, the visual cortex was essentially uncharted territory. In their 2004 book, Brain and Visual Perception (Oxford University Press), Wiesel described how he and David “approached the visual cortex as explorers of a new world”.

Kuffler had shown during the 1950s that shining spots of light on a small part of a rabbit's field of view triggered strong signalling in specific neurons in the retina, with nearby neurons having overlapping 'receptive fields'. This work revealed that, in travelling from the photoreceptors to the output neurons of the retina, visual information is deconstructed into an image that resembles a George Seurat-like pointillistic painting. But how it is resynthesized to generate a complete picture of the world, as seen by both eyes, remained a mystery.

Hubel and Wiesel found that the spots of light that so effectively activated retinal neurons and the neurons of the lateral geniculate nucleus (a relay point between the retina and the visual cortex), had no effect on the neurons in the visual cortex. Then, one evening, the pair noticed that a view of the edge of one of their stimulus slides made cortical neurons respond robustly. Furthermore, many of these 'edge-detecting' neurons were responding to information from both eyes.

Hubel and Wiesel had just discovered the first visual-circuit steps used to reassemble our binocular view of the world. They reported their findings in two beautifully written studies in The Journal of Physiology in 1959 and 1962.

In the years that followed, Hubel and Wiesel found that neurons responsive to the same line or edge orientation clustered together in vertical columns stretching from the outer surface of the visual cortex to its inner white matter. And neurons responding best to stimuli presented to the right or to the left eye were located near each other, also in vertical clusters.

This columnar architecture seemed so precise that initially, researchers thought it was hard-wired. But through studies of cats and monkeys that had had one eyelid sealed, as well as of children with congenital cataracts, Hubel and Wiesel found that visual experience could alter it. They observed that, during a restricted developmental window, when vision in one eye was impeded, the good eye 'hijacked' cortical circuits that should have been shared equally between the two eyes. This finding was the first example of how experience can change brain circuits. In 1981, Hubel and Wiesel were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their studies of how the visual cortex processes information, along with neurobiologist Roger Sperry.

David had a lifelong love of art and music. Sometimes in the evenings, when I was a PhD student in his and Wiesel's lab during the 1970s, the haunting sounds of his flute would waft down the hallway. He also enjoyed fabricating the tools of his trade, such as tungsten microelectrodes, often using the lathe that he kept in his lab.

Aside from his children (David had three sons with his wife, Ruth), his largest personal legacy may be his passion for fundamental, discovery-based research. He communicated this enthusiasm to legions of graduate and medical students with spellbinding lectures, often using illustrations of optical illusions to link the science of the visual system to the beauty of art and visual perception.

David worried publicly about the state of biomedical research: large labs lead by faculty who are too busy with grant-writing and administration to be able to participate in their own experiments. Even after he closed his own lab, he ran a seminar for Harvard undergraduates, teaching them the fundamentals of neuroscience as well as hands-on lab techniques, including how to use a lathe, solder a circuit board and look through a microscope.

David showed generations of young scientists and clinicians how science can become art and how art can become science. Our understanding of the brain and perception has changed profoundly because of him.

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Carla J. Shatz is director of Bio-X and professor of biology and neurobiology at Stanford University in California. In 1971–1976 she was a PhD student and junior fellow with David Hubel at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts.,

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In Cats David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel’s experiments showed that if a kitten is deprived of normal visual experience during a critical period at the start of its life, the circuitry of the neurons in its visual cortex is irreversibly altered.

In each of a number of newborn kittens, one eyelid was sutured shut. The kitten was allowed to grow up that way, and when it reached adulthood (around 6 months), its eyelid was opened again. Recordings were than made of the electrophysiological activity in each of the kitten’s eyes. These recordings showed an abnormally low number of neurons reacting in the eye that had been sutured shut, and an abnormally high number in the other eye. Macroscopic observation of the visual cortex showed that the ocular dominance columns for the eye that had been left open had grown larger, while those for the eye that had been closed had shrunk. Remarkably, Hubel and Wiesel also found that if the eye of an adult cat was sutured shut for a year, the responses of the cells in its visual cortex remain identical in all respects to those of a normal cat. Later experiments showed that suturing a cat’s eye shut had no effect on its visual cortex unless this visual deprivation took place during the first three months of the cat’s life. In Primates Other experiments have shown that this same phenomenon also occurs in primates, though the critical period is longer (up to age 6 months). Austin Riesen reared monkeys in darkness for the first 3 to 6 months of their lives. When these animals were then introduced into a normal environment, they had great difficulties in distinguishing even the simplest shapes. It took them weeks or even months to learn how to tell a circle from a square—a task that a normal monkey learns in a few days. Wiesel and Hubel also explored what happens in a monkey’s primary visual cortex when one of its eyelids is sutured shut for the first 6 months of its life. Normally, in monkeys, as in cats and humans, the two eyes work together to provide a single, three-dimensional image of the outside world, but this image is actually composed of two separate, slightly offset images on the two retinas. Wiesel and Hubel showed that it is not until the signals from the retinas reach the primary visual cortex that the brain begins to merge them into one, three-dimensional image. In monkeys who had one eyelid sutured shut right after birth, when the eyelid was opened again at 6 months of age, the animals had lost practically all useful vision in the eye that had been sensorily deprived. Yet recordings of electrophysiological activity in the ganglion cells of the retina of that eye, and the lateral geniculate nucleus cells for that eye, showed that these cells’ visual fields were normal and functional. It was only the primary visual cortex cells for that eye that showed practically no activity. Other experiments in which both eyelids were temporarily sutured shut showed that normal development of connectivity in the visual cortex does not depend on the absolute activity of the neural pathways from the two eyes, but rather on competition between the relative activities of these two pathways. As in other development processes for which there is a critical period, sensory deprivation does not have the same effect on adult animals—i.e., suturing shut one eyelid of an adult animal has no effect on the response of the visual cortex cells for that eye or for the other eye. In contrast, during the most sensitive part of the critical period, visual deprivation for as little as one week can have catastrophic effects on the animal’s vision for the rest of its lifetime.

In Humans In humans, certain diseases can cause a cataract (a total or partial opacity of the lens) in one or both eyes. Cataracts can occur not only in adults but also in very young children. Cataracts can now usually be removed surgically. Studies of individuals who had such surgery at various times in their lives showed that in humans as in other animals, there is a critical period for the development of the sense of sight. These studies demonstrated for the first time that early environmental influences, and hence particular neural activity patterns during a critical period, can permanently alter the neural connections in certain areas of the human brain.

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• Torsten N. Wiesel - Interview

Torsten N. Wiesel

Interview with Dr. Torsten Wiesel by Joanna Rose, science writer, 8 December 2001.

Dr. Wiesel talks about his studies of the visual process in the brain; challenges in neurophysiology (8:21); colour vision and the perception of the world (11:01); and his present work in helping to train students from the developing countries (14:49).

Interview transcript

Welcome to this Nobel interview, Professor Torsten Wiesel. You have devoted your long career in science to studies of the visual processing in the brain and now we can say, and we know, that this is not a simple thing, a simple process, rather a result of a long process that begins in the eyes but definitely does not stop here.

Torsten Wiesel: Correct. Of course it’s a very complex thing you’re asking the brain to do, because we can see details, colour, depth, moving objects, etc. Your camera cannot move without getting a slur in the image that is unclear, whereas your eye can move from one part of the room to another and still everything is clear. So this is a very complex machine that can carry out all these various functions, and we are, I think, still at a relatively primitive stage of a complete understanding of the neuro basis of perception. So it’s a long way still to go even if progress has been made.

So this is not just a mechanical process? It is a question of interpretation?

Torsten Wiesel: Right. The brain has to decompose an image that falls on your retina and there are hundreds of millions of receptors in your eye, photo receptors that are sensitive to light and then there’s only one million fibres going from the eye into the brain. So already in the eye there’s some processing, complex processing of the image and then that’s sent into the brain and then it’s further composed together so that you can see all the things in detail. I used to say to students it’s not like a fax machine, that you send an image up to the brain and there are little people looking up in the brain at that picture, because you actually have to decompose the picture, send it like a message up and then rebuild it so you can perceive it and we know some of the code that is used by the brain to carry this out but we are still at an early stage of understanding that process.

In spite of nearly 50 years of studies, I wonder what do you consider as the major step in our understanding of how the visual system works during these years.

Torsten Wiesel: During these last 50 years?

During your career, I would say.

Torsten Wiesel: During my career … You know, I came into a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University at the time. My mentor there was a man by the name of Stephen Kuffler and he had studied cells in the eye that leave the eye going to the brain and learnt about the way that these cells decode the visual image. Also the Swedish scientist by the name of Ragnar Granit was also very important in vision research and he received the Nobel Prize in 1967, I believe, for his work on the eye. My colleague David Hubel and I, we were fortunate when we started, in 1958 we started to work together, and try to understand how images sent in from the eye are handled by the brain and so that was some advances made during our collaboration. We worked together for 20 years in trying to understand how the first and second stage in the brain handle visual information and particularly in the visual cortexes, a primary visual cortex, it’s called.

But even after the Nobel Prize you continued your research?

Torsten Wiesel: Yes. But you ask for the last 50 years with advances. So the reason why we got the Nobel Prize was because we made some advances obviously, and that was part of what I said, the decode, the fact that cells in visual cortex respond to contours of given orientations. So that then a phase, for example, is decomposed and then rebuilt perhaps cells responding to different orientation of your facial contours will feed and assemble cells responding in a particular way and the advances since that time scientists have recorded from higher visual areas, because first the signal from the eye goes to the primary cortex, then the second, the tertiary higher structures and we don’t have to go into the details, but at some stage, maybe three steps away, there are cells that actually respond to a face.

Not your face necessarily, but any face that is contoured like a face with eyes and nose and a mouth; those basic characteristics. So that is a major advance in the sense that cells can be so specific that they can respond to a particular object. There are probably other cells responding to a face or a form or shape. Of course these cells you’re not born with necessarily, because there’s a certain plasticity in the brain so that you can not only learn to recognise a new face but also objects which you never knew existed, like in modern art, for example, sometimes you see very abstract things which are invented by humans and you still can see them, recognise them and sort of store them as a visual memory like you store a face.

But still I am not born with the cells that are focussed on modern art?

Torsten Wiesel: You’re born with the machinery to learn how to build an image. So these cells are sensitive to contours.

Very flexible machine.

Torsten Wiesel: You’re born with those cells. The newborn child can disseminate colour, it can see things, objects and so on. There’s a certain basic thing we are born with, but then of course you learn a lot of things. You recognise chairs and all kinds of things. So some part of our brains remain flexible all through life so you can learn new things, not only in vision but in language and movement etc.

The field of brain studies has developed tremendously since you entered it in the ’50s. What do you find is the most interesting challenges in neurophysiology today?

Torsten Wiesel: Neuroscience is advanced to a large extent because new ways have developed to study subjects.

New instruments or new ways of thinking?

Torsten Wiesel: New instrumentation. Both new instrumentation and new conceptual questions perhaps asked. Sometimes you ask questions now that you didn’t ask earlier because there were no way of getting an answer.

What are these questions?

Torsten Wiesel: For example to ask the question that I said before that we want to understand the neuro basis of perception. That question wasn’t asked 50 years ago as a realistic scientific issue, but today it is realistic to try to actually have an experimental programme that tries to address that question so that’s the difference. And I think, you know, there are some people who feel that now it’s the right time also to understand not only neuro base of perception but also the higher issue of consciousness in general because in order to have perception you have to be conscious otherwise you don’t perceive. So those two are obviously linked very much.

So if you want to address a question of consciousness, then perhaps you have to do it in a context of a specific issue, like vision where you have a perception. You can when we know more perhaps about the sensory part of the brain in vision than in the other part of the brain because there has been a lot of interest, a lot of people have studied the various stages of the vision system both in psychophysics and in the laboratories, anatomy, physiology, chemistry etc. So there’s a lot of knowledge here, so I think the next decades in the future you are going to see more and a better understanding of the perception and consciousness related to that.

Yes, there is this question, for example, when I see this flower and I see the red colour here, I recognise the colour here, I call it red. How can I be sure that the red colour that you see is the same that the one that I see? Do you think that neurophysiology can answer such questions?

Torsten Wiesel: Yes, of course it’s been known for a long time that colour vision varies between individuals because it depends very much on the visual pigment you have in your eye.

So maybe your red is my green, for example?

Torsten Wiesel: Most people have, not so much, but we have the cones; we have red, we have blue and we have green cones and they have their own spectre of sensitivity. Most people have very similar spectres and sensitivity of their cones but there are variations. So some in the red cone and maybe a slight difference in the peak sensitivity of the red cone, somebody else may have it in blue. So there may be slight variation, but then there are mutations. There are people who actually have no red cones or blue cones or green cones, so they have specific colour defects and it can be dangerous if you’re in the traffic and you know the red light and you don’t see red light and you have to know that the red is on top and the green is below.

So I think one has to assume that in most cases our perception of colour in this bouquet of flowers is probably similar, even if maybe somebody else would have a clear difference. I have a painter friend actually who had a deficit in his colour, his vision and his paintings reflected that. His colour scheme was kind of strange and some people found it very interesting but, you know, that was based on the fact that he saw the colours different from you and me perhaps.

Yes, perhaps. But there still is this problem of consciousness of the subjective perception of the world. It’s sometimes called explanatory gap, how can our emotions and our perceptions translate into the hardware of the brain. Do you think that neurophysiology can jump over this gap or fill it in?

Torsten Wiesel: Knowledge advances in science at least, usually step by step, and depending on your background and the literature you read you may feel that there is a gap but some of us may feel there is no gap. It’s just a feel of ignorance. You have a knowledge here, up to this point and then you need to know more. You’re ignorant, you don’t understand something else and to have a complete basis for perception let’s say, because that’s what we’re talking about. So you can see that as a gap and it certainly is a gap in our knowledge but it’s not the conceptual gap.

I have one last question about something else. You have left the research now and you have recently focussed your interest on other issues than doing research I would say. What engaged you most by now?

Torsten Wiesel: You know I was a professor at Rockefeller for a number of years.

Rockefeller University in New York, yes?

Torsten Wiesel: Rockefeller University in New York and I had been in Harvard. David Hubel and I worked together most of our time at Harvard, started out at Hopkins but then as a professor there was a need at a university so I was asked by the Board of Trustees to become president of that institution. It was in December ’91 and so I accepted to do that. So I did it for seven years. During that period it was very difficult for me to do experiments and I was 67 years old at the time. So after seven years I was close to 75 and the question was what … I was still full of interest and energy so instead of going to the laboratory I continued expanding, I should say, my interest in trying to help young scientists to have the same opportunities I had as a young scientist and to try to help to train students from developing countries.

You mean to move from one country to another to come to good laboratories?

Torsten Wiesel: Yes, I’ve been running a programme for Latin American students, supported by the Pew Charitable Trust for ten years, bringing ten students a year from Latin America to come to the United States for training. Another interest I have … I’m now Secretary General for the Human Frontier Science Program which has headquarters in Strasbourg and we gave about 140 fellowships a year to students from all over the world, from 60 different countries.

As stipends for studies?

Professor Torsten Wies el Stipend for studies. It’s now a three year programme and most of the students come to United States for studies and many of them stay in the United States because opportunities to do science there are usually better, particularly in the developing countries and I’m very interested to try to change that pattern so that we can help to provide opportunities for good training but also provide opportunity for young people coming back to their home country to carry out similar type of research as they did doing the training.So this is a major challenge I think that one should make serious effort.

It’s also provided opportunities, even in developed countries, it’s difficult for young scientists to be independent, to get funds to do their own research because Europe and also in Japan the professor is still taken very seriously whereas in United States a professor is not taken so seriously and the custom there is that as a young professor, assistant professor, you get your own lab, your own money and you’re doing your own research whereas in Europe and many part of the world it’s still not the case, you are still an assistant to the professor rather than independent scientists. This is an issue that I find very important for Europe and other parts of the world to develop really good science. It turns out the reason I think for the American success has been money but also the way science is organised.

So you want to spread the idea of organising science because you yourself were born in Sweden but you have had your career in the States.

Torsten Wiesel: My scientific career in the States, yes, in part because of circumstances I had very good collaborator with David Hubel, we worked very well together. So that was one temptation. In science America became my homeland whereas when I come here I feel very much at home but it’s not as a scientists, it’s more as a person, a private person.

I understand. I wish we had more time to discuss these issues but thank you very much for the interview.

Torsten Wiesel: My pleasure, thank you.

Did you find any typos in this text? We would appreciate your assistance in identifying any errors and to let us know. Thank you for taking the time to report the errors by sending us an e-mail .

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Purves D, Augustine GJ, Fitzpatrick D, et al., editors. Neuroscience. 2nd edition. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates; 2001.

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Neuroscience. 2nd edition.

Critical periods in visual system development.

Although critical periods for language and other distinctively human behaviors are in some ways the most compelling examples, it is difficult if not impossible to study the underlying changes in brain circuits. A much deeper understanding of the changes in circuitry that accompany critical periods has come from studies of the developing visual system. In an extraordinarily influential series of experiments, David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel found that depriving an experimental animal of normal visual experience during a restricted period of early postnatal life irreversibly alters neuronal connections (and functions) in the visual cortex. These observations provided the first evidence that the brain translates the effects of early experience (that is, patterns of neural activity) into permanently altered wiring.

To understand these experiments and their implications, it is important to review the organization and development of the mammalian visual system. Information from the two eyes is first integrated in the primary visual (striate) cortex, where most afferents from the lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus terminate (see Chapter 12). In some mammals—carnivores, anthropoid primates, and humans—the afferent terminals form an alternating series of eye-specific domains in cortical layer IV called ocular dominance columns ( Figure 24.3 ). As already noted in Chapter 12, ocular dominance columns can be visualized by injecting tracers, such as radioactive proline, into one eye; the tracer is then transported along the visual pathway to specifically label the geniculocortical terminals (i.e., synaptic terminals in the visual cortex) corresponding to that eye ( Box C ). In the adult macaque monkey, the domains representing the two eyes are stripes of about equal width (0.5 mm) that occupy roughly equal areas of layer IV of the primary visual cortex. Electrical recordings confirm that the cells within layer IV of macaques respond strongly or exclusively to stimulation of either the left or the right eye, while neurons in layers above and below layer IV integrate inputs from the left and right eyes and respond to visual stimuli presented to either eye. Ocular dominance is thus apparent in two related phenomena: the degree to which individual cortical neurons are driven by stimulation of one eye or the other, and domains (stripes) in cortical layer IV in which the majority of neurons are driven exclusively by one eye or the other. The clarity of these patterns of connectivity and the precision by which experience via the two eyes can be manipulated led to a series of experiments that greatly clarified the neurobiological processes underlying critical periods.

Figure 24.3

Ocular dominance columns (which in most anthropoid primates are really stripes or bands) in layer IV of the primary visual cortex of an adult macaque monkey. Diagram indicates the labeling procedure (see also Box C); following transynaptic transport, (more...)

Transneuronal Labeling with Radioactive Amino Acids.

• Cite this Page Purves D, Augustine GJ, Fitzpatrick D, et al., editors. Neuroscience. 2nd edition. Sunderland (MA): Sinauer Associates; 2001. Critical Periods in Visual System Development.

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