Making Sense of Sight: The Story of Hubel and Wiesel

In the late 1950s, two young researchers at Johns Hopkins threaded an electrode into a cat's brain and stumbled onto a discovery that would win them the Nobel Prize: single neurons that fire only for a specific edge of light at a specific angle. This episode traces David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel's work from that lucky afternoon through the mapping of the visual cortex. Along the way we go back into the history of vision research, before following the trail forward into convolutional neural networks and modern computer vision. It's a story about how the brain doesn't just see, it decodes.

We thank the Karolinska institutet for kindly granting permission to use audio recordings of Hubel and Wiesel's Nobel Prize lectures.

The voice used in this podcast was generated using artificial intelligence.