Torsten Wiesel (Rockefeller University): Exploring the Visual Brain

Nobel Laureate Torsten Wiesel shares the story of how he and David Hubel discovered how the brain processes visual information.

ibiology.org/neuroscience/exploring-visual-brain/ Dr. Torsten Wiesel tells us the story of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of how the brain processes information through the visual cortex. Talk Overview: Dr. Torsten Wiesel tells us the story of the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of how the brain processes information through the visual cortex. Together with David Hubel, Wiesel used micro-electrodes to monitor changes to a single neuron’s action potential with visual stimuli. With this simple, but innovative experiment, they were able to map each visual stimulus to a specific region of the brain, providing insight on how the brain generates an image from visual inputs. Speaker Biography: Wiesel received his medical degree from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and continued his training in ophthalmology at Johns Hopkins University Medical School.  There he began a collaboration with Dr. David Hubel, which led to a major breakthrough in the understanding of the visual cortex and ultimately resulted in them be awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1981. Wiesel moved to Harvard University in 1959 and in 1983 he moved to Rockefeller University where he was president from 1991 until 1998. Wiesel was elected as a Foreign Member of Royal Society in 1982, and received the National Medal of Sciences in 2005.