tailieunhanh - EVOLUTION OF IDEAS ON THE PRIMARY VISUAL CORTEX, 1955-1978: A BIASED HISTORICAL ACCOUNTN

Other types of reports can now be extracted from the PCA database, such as the age and gender of the patients involved in MIRs reported, or the locations where the incidents occurred. The ability to extract this type of data is important to the PCA Committee as it moves forward with efforts to identify and address quality and patient issues statewide. For example, recent database query shows that 280 Major Incident Reports list the operating room as the location where the incident occurred. Additional analysis of these statistics is needed, but it is a start towards a review of. | EVOLUTION OF IDEAS ON THE PRIMARY VISUAL CORTEX 1955-1978 A BIASED HISTORICAL ACCOUNT Nobel lecture 8 December 1981 by_ DAVID H. HUBEL Harvard Medical School Department of Neurobiology Boston Massachusetts . INTRODUCTION In the early spring of 1958 I drove over to Baltimore from Washington . and in a cafeteria at Johns Hopkins Hospital met Stephen Kuffler and Torsten Wiesel for a discussion that was more momentous for Torsten s and my future than either of us could have possibly imagined. I had been at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research for three years in the Neuropsychiatry Section headed by David Rioch working under the supervision of . Fuortes. I began at Walter Reed by developing a tungsten microelectrode and a technique for using it to record from chronically implanted cats and I had been comparing the firing of cells in the visual pathways of sleeping and waking animals. It was time for a change in my research tactics. In sleeping cats only diffuse light could reach the retina through the closed eyelids. Whether the cat was asleep or awake with eyes open diffuse light failed to stimulate the cells in the striate cortex. In waking animals I had succeeded in activating many cells with moving spots on a screen and had found that some cells were very selective in that they responded when a spot moved in one direction across the screen . from left to right but not when it moved in the opposite direction 1 Fig. 1 . There were many cells that I could not influence at all. Obviously there was a gold mine in the visual cortex but methods were needed that would permit the recording of single cells for many hours and with the eyes immobilized if the mine were ever to begin producing. I had planned to do a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins Medical School with Vernon Mountcastle but the timing was awkward for him because he was remodeling his laboratories. One day Kuffler called and asked if I would like to work in his laboratory at the .