Al Weisel was a bloggers blogger and he helped me when I started out. We maintained a modest off-line relationship and had a good on line one as well. He has died, and he will be missed.
This was his site, and this is a post honoring him. You may have known him as as Jon Swift.
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It's in every neuroscience textbook: the kitten that never saw with stereoscopic vision, because Hubel and Weisel sutured one of its eyes shut during the "critical period" of brain development. The moral, at least as I was taught it, was that plasticity has limits.
The classic Nobel Prize-winning studies of David Hubel and Torsten Weisel showed how the proper maturation of the developing visual cortex is critically dependent upon visual information received from the eyes.
Don't worry, the period of shameless self-promotion is almost over. But Proust Was A Neuroscientist has been in the news lately. The San Francisco Chronicle had a very kind review:
The pioneering experiments performed by Hubel and Weisel in the late 1950s and early 60s taught us much about the development of the visual system.
That's very sad. He was a brilliant parodist.
Oh. I used to read him religiously, for lack of a better word. The mark of good satire is the number of people who don't realize it's satire. By that yardstick, alone, he was great.