Hubei, David

The extracellular microelectrode recording technique developed by David Hubei for his epochal studies of the cat visual system and further perfected by Eduard Evarts for his pioneering work on the cat motor system was easily applied to exploring the brain stem. There were two major obstacles that needed to be overcome to guarantee success, however. The first was movement not only was head movement itself a problem, but body movement also had to be limited because the targets were deep and located on the major axis of lateral and vertical head-on-neck movement. The second problem was identification of the neurons of interest. At the onset, no one knew that the modulatory elements would identify themselves both by their distinctive spike-to-spike firing pattern, but also—and this is the main point of the discovery—by their dramatic state dependent alterations of firing propensity. 

Figure 2.10 Structure of the primary visual cortex. The primary visual cortex consists of six layers. Vertical columns (blobs) are found in layer 2, 3, 5, and 6. (Copyright 1984 by the Society for Neuroscience. Reproduced by permission of Society for Neuroscience. M. S. Livingstone and David H. Hubei. Anatomy and physiology of a color system in the primate visual cortex. The Journal of Neuroscience, Vol. 4, No. 1, pp. 309-356, Jan., 1984.)...

Nobel Prize winners David Hubei and Torsten Weisel discovered how we perceive images. Neuronal genes encode the responses of different photoreceptors and send... 

An excellent introductory text about the visual system is Eye, Brain, and Vision, by Nobel laureate, David H. Hubei (1995, Scientific American Library, New York). A more recent general text with a thorough treatment of color vision, as well as the higher cortical centers, is A Vision of the Brain, by Semir Zeki (1993, Blackwell Scientific Publications, Oxford). 

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