My abiding passion during my 4-decade scientific career has been to deepen our understanding of the multi-dimensional human experience in terms of brain mechanisms. Toward that end, my research focused on sensation and perception. Scientists in my field are interested in questions like: How do we see color? How are tiny complex black & white patterns perceived and understood as symbols on a page that can change lives, change the world? How do vibrations of air molecules come to be transformed into linguistic messages, or rhythms that make us dance or sing? How can a painting or a melody move us to tears? What do babies see, and how can we know? Does the brain have a special center devoted to the aesthetic experience, the universal experience of beauty? Why are some people unable to recognize faces? Why are humans the only creatures that can flexibly, creatively make music, or dance or invent novel rhythms and melodies, and how do we do it? How do we come to know what we know?
The answers to such questions reveal both what is uniquely human as well as what we share with other species. Modern neuroscience has begun to answer many, but not all of these questions. We are even beginning to unravel some of the brain mechanisms underlying experiences previously thought to be the sole domain of philosophers and psychologists, like recent discoveries of “beauty-perception centers” – aesthetic modules – in the brain!
My Background
I received my Ph.D. in Sensory Neuroscience at Syracuse University in 1979, focusing on the exquisitely sensitive tactile senses. My post-doctoral research focused on visual development of infants at the University of Washington (UW), Seattle, using forced-choice preferential looking (FPL) methods developed by Davida Y. Teller. The FPL technique permitted me and my colleagues to objectively measure color vision in young infants. Our work indicated that color vision developed rapidly over the first few months of life.
At the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, I continued research in visual development using swept-parameter visual evoked potentials (sVEP) which permitted rapid, sensitive noninvasive measurement of visual responses at the level of visual cortex. Using the sVEP, my colleagues and I established developmental norms of visual acuity (the limits of detail vision), visual contrast sensitivity (sensitivity to subtle shadings of light and dark), motion sensitivity, as well as cortical signatures of binocular vision (or lack of).
In addition to the visual development research, in subsequent work, I developed detailed computational models of vertebrate rod and cone phototransduction, addressing decades-long conundra regarding the biochemical bases for the surprising reproducibility of rod single-photon responses.
Between 2007-2014 I continued my research in visual development at the Institute of Psychology at the University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. We measured sVEP acuity and contrast sensitivity in very-low-birthweight (VLBW), but otherwise healthy infants who had presumably experienced lower-than-normal nutrition during gestation.
Since 2014, I have been studying and writing about the Surreal Art of the Belgian artist, René Magritte and what his art can reveal about visual processing. Magritte’s exquistely rendered paintings both beckon and confuse. His works are “mined” with visual/perceptual paradoxes: an interior scene is suddenly perceived as outside, in a field; a horse and rider appear to be blocked by empty space; a nude woman’s sikn appears to be made of oak; a man looks into a mirror and sees himself, viewed from behind, looking into a mirror. The surreal elements of his paintings provide lessons about our own perception, about what the brain “expects”: he reveals these by violating these unconscious expectations. His goal as an artist is to “…make poetry visible…to render thought visible…” and draw us to experience “the mystery of the ordinary”.