Eye, Brain, and Vision

PREFACE

This book is mainly about the development of our ideas on how the brain
handles visual information; it covers roughly the period between 1950 and
1980. The book is unabashedly concerned largely with research that I have
been involved in or have taken a close interest in. I count myself lucky to have
been around in that era, a time of excitement and fun. Some of the experiments
have been arduous, or so it has often seemed at 4:00 A.M., especially when
everything has gone wrong. But 98 percent of the time the work is exhilarat-
ing. There is a special immediacy to neurophysiological experiments: we can
see and hear a cell respond to the stimuli we use and often realize, right at the
time, what the responses imply for brain function. And in modern science,
neurobiology is still an area in which one can work alone or with one col-
league, on a budget that is minuscule by the standards of particle physics or
astronomy. To have trained and worked on the North American continent has been a
special piece of good luck, given the combination of a wonderful university
system and a government that has consistently backed research in biology,
especially in vision. I can only hope that we have the sense to cherish and
preserve such blessings. In writing the book I have had the astronomer in mind as my prototypical reader—someone with scientific training but not an expert in biology, let
alone neurobiology. I have tried to give just enough background to make the
neurobiology comprehensible, without loading the text down with material of
interest only to experts. To steer a course between excessive superficiality and
excessive detail has not been easy, especially because the very nature of the
brain compels us to look at a wealth of articulated, interrelated details in order
to come away with some sense of what it is and does. All the research described here, in which I have played any part, has been the outcome ofjoint efforts. From 1958 to the late 1970s my work was in partner-ship with Torstcn Wiesel. Had it not been for his ideas, energy, enthusiasm,stamina, and willingness to put up with an exasperating colleague, the out-come would have been very different. Both of us owe a profound debt to
Stephen Kuffler, who in the early years guided our work with the lightest
hand imaginable, encouraged us with his boundless enthusiasm, and occasion-
ally discouraged our duller efforts simply by looking puzzled.
For help in writing one needs critics (I certainly do)—the harsher and more
unmerciful, the better. I owe a special debt to Eric Kandel for his help with the
emphasis in the opening three chapters, and to my colleague Margaret Living-
stone, who literally tore three of the chapters apart. One of her comments
began, "First you are vague, and then you are snide . . . ." She also tolerated
much irascibility and postponement of research. To the editors of the Scien-
tific American Library, notably Susan Moran, Linda Davis, Gerard Piel, and
Linda Chaput, and to the copyeditor, Cynthia Farden, I owe a similar debt: I
had not realized how much a book depends on able and devoted editors. They
corrected countless English solecisms, but their help went far beyond that, to
spotting duplications, improving clarity, and tolerating my insistence on plac-
ing commas and periods after quotation marks. Above all, they would not
stop bugging me until I had written the ideas in an easily understandable (I
hope!) form. I want to thank Carol Donner for her artwork, as well as Nancy
Field, the designer, Melanie Nielson, the illustration coordinator, and Susan
Stetzer, the production coordinator. I am also grateful for help in the form of
critical reading from Susan Abookire, David Cardozo, Whittemore Tingley,
Deborah Gordon, Richard Masland, and Laura Regan. As always, my secre-
tary, Olivia Brum, was helpful to the point of being indispensable and tolerant
of my moods beyond any reasonable call of duty. My wife, Ruth, contributed
much advice and put up with many lost weekends. It will be a relief not to
have to hear my children say, "Daddy, when are you going to finish that
book?" It has, at times, seemed as remote a quest as Sancho Panza's island.
David H. Hubel

The changes I have made for this paperback edition consist mainly of minor
corrections, the most embarrassing of which is the formula for converting
degrees to radians. My high school mathematics teachers must be turning over
in their graves. I have not made any attempt to incorporate recent research on
the visual cortex, which in the last ten years has mostly focussed on areas
beyond the striate cortex. To extend the coverage to include these areas would
have required another book. I did feel that it would be unforgivable not to say
something about two major advances: the work ofjeremy Nathans on the
genetics of visual pigments, and recent work on the development of the visual
system, by Caria Schatz, Michael Stryker, and others.
David H. Hubel
January 1995