Brain and Visual Perception: The Story of a Twenty-Five-Year Collaboration (review)

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who engaged in a remarkably long-lasting and extremely productive collaboration crowned by a shared Nobel Prize in 1981, shaped our current understanding of visual perception. A detailed account of their collaboration would have been another noteworthy achievement, this time in the historiography of twentieth-century neuroscience. The title of their book, however, is slightly misleading: following two brief biographical sketches describing their respective entries into the world of science, and four short chapters on the scientific background and specifics of their collaboration, the volume is made up of twenty-six reprints of their papers, starting with the first coauthored one from 1959 and ending with their Nobel Lectures. Reminiscent of nineteenth-century editions of the literary output of famous scientists, the collection offers, above all, immediate and comprehensive access to their major research papers. These are arranged in three thematic sections: the laborious mapping studies of the visual pathways; the famous deprivation experiments; and finally, the summarizing review papers.

To be fair, this is more than a mere collection of reprints: the introduction, biographical chapters, comments, and afterthoughts make up almost a fifth of the book. The authors' ostensible motivation was "to restore some of the juices" that were usually "sucked out" (p. 2) of dry scientific writings, and perhaps the biggest surprise is the apparent difficulty that two exceptional individuals experienced in trying to do so. This cannot (or can only partially) be ascribed to the unadventurous lives that they almost apologetically admit to having led. Rather, it seems to reflect an inability to transcend the scientific style of writing, with its focus on factual reporting. Hubel and Wiesel seem to have acquired such a mastery of this idiom that, despite being aware of the epistemological richness of their undertaking, they limit their comments to reporting circumstantial data.

This may explain why, for example, a most perceptive description of science-in-the-making is to be found, not among their reflections, but in the introduction, where they note that "much of our time has been spent tinkering, playing with forms, colors, and rates of movement in an effort to learn what our cells need, in the way of stimuli, to make them react" (p. 3). This observation alludes to aspects of experimental practice that go well beyond that which is generally included in scientific papers. Unfortunately, the authors devote only a few reflections to further investigating this material context of experimental research, leaving the reprinted papers, in this respect, as undeciphered marvels. Indeed, the papers expose an extraordinary learning curve, demonstrating how Hubel and Wiesel used imaginative tricks to master brain cells and gain unforeseen insights into visual perception—and how these same cells dragged them into complex investigative pathways.

Furthermore, the volume documents an apparently bygone era in which observations were reported only once, after a year-long series of experiments and in monograph-long journal articles. Theirs was an extraordinary, exclusive, and extravagantly high-class output. Measured by contemporary "publish-or-perish" standards, however, they wrote remarkably little: thirty-seven joint papers during twenty-five years; even when we count their individual papers as well, Hubel and Wiesel published only about two papers a year. This volume is thus an extremely valuable source book for an important chapter of neuroscientific research in the twentieth century (though bibliographies for both authors remain desiderata). The story—and the history—of the twenty-five-year collaboration, however, still remains unwritten.