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The Changing Brain

Mark Bear: June 13, 2003; Running Time: 49:21

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

How do our right and left eyes take in two separate streams of visual information and end up with a single view of the world? This question has come under intense scrutiny from neuroscientists for decades, and Mark Bear brings us up to date in his lecture. Single neurons in the visual cortex respond to particular stimuli (such as direction or color) and then the brain does some fancy filtering to process only the stimuli that match up in both eyes. Bear describes breakthrough experiments where researchers closed the eye of a kitten for just a day or so, and found that it was effectively “blind” after it opened. Correlating visual information to produce binocular images depends on neural connections that are forged during a “critical period” of visual cortex development. Bear’s work with visual system neurotransmitters has turned up intriguing connections to conditions like Fragile X syndrome. This form of mental retardation may result from a similar loss of neural connections during a parallel critical period after birth.

Lecture Details

Location: 3-170

About the Speaker

Mark Bear

Director, and Picower Professor of Neuroscience
The Picower Center for Learning and Memory Investigator
Howard Hughes Medical Institute

Before his arrival at MIT, Mark Bear was on the faculty of Brown University School of Medicine for 17 years. After receiving his B.S. from Duke University, he earned his Ph.D. in neurobiology at Brown. He took postdoctoral training at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and from Leon Cooper at Brown. His honors include young investigator awards from the Office of Naval Research and the Society for Neuroscience. He is a member of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives and the Neuroscience Research Program at the Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, California.