Study Resolves 60-Year Debate Over Visual Perception by Directly Observing Information Flow in the Brain

A study resolving a 60-year debate over the “Hubel-Wiesel model,” the theory recognized with the 1981 Nobel Prize, has been published in the international journal Science. A research team at the Technical University of Munich was the first to demonstrate that signals transmitted from the brain’s thalamus to the visual cortex have no directional specificity, while direction selectivity is generated through circuit processing within the cortex. The high-resolution imaging technology used in the study could help identify dysfunctional circuits in neurological diseases such as Alzheimer disease in the future.