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| The Brain Basis of Human Vision |
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SPEAKER:
Nancy Kanwisher
Investigator, McGovern Institute
Ellen Swallow Richards Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience
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ABOUT THE LECTURE:
Nancy Kanwisher’s breakthrough scanning research reveals “a teeny part of an answer to the big question of what kinds of brains we have,” she says. Her work depends on functional MRI, a way of imaging people’s brains that detects areas of high neural activity. Kanwisher focuses on vision, to which almost 1/2 of the human cortex is dedicated. “Before fMRI, we knew almost nothing about how that part of the brain was organized,” says Kanwisher. In some of her earliest work, she put her subjects in the fMRI machine, showed them pictures of faces and objects and scanned their heads. She found an area that lit up exclusively in response to the faces. She has found other regions since then, “kind of mind-blowing, because nobody predicted them.” There’s brain circuitry devoted to places and spatial layouts, and another distinct region that responds selectively to body parts like feet, elbows and knees.
Kanwisher has shown that our “minds contain at least a small number of very specialized mechanisms to process very specific kinds of information.” There are lots of questions remaining, though, like determining which mental functions get “their own private piece of cortex and which don’t.” Fruits and vegetables for instance, don't seem to merit their own special brain area. Kanwisher would like to know how these mechanisms arise during development -- whether in response to genetic wiring or environmental stimuli -- and how they change during adulthood.
During exchanges with audience members, Kanwisher says she doesn’t believe that “every mental function of interest happens in one little bit of the brain, because the range of human experience is too broad and varied to fit each into its own little patch.” She dismisses as “baloney” assertions about fundamental cognitive differences between men and women. She also answers questions about scanning in animals, infants and children; evolutionary pressure of brain development; and the limitations of fMRI.
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ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Nancy Kanwisher studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition. Her work investigates object recognition, visual attention, and perceptual awareness, as well as response selection, social cognition and the human understanding of number. Her lab has identified several regions of the brain that play specialized roles in the perception of specific categories of visual stimuli such as faces, places, and bodies.
Kanwisher joined the MIT faculty in 1997, and prior to that was a faculty member at UCLA from 1990 to 1994 and at Harvard University from 1994 to 1997. She received her Ph.D. in 1986 from MIT. In 1999, she received the National Academy of Sciences' Troland Research Award. And in 2005 she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
Kanwisher's website
NOTES ON THE VIDEO (Time Index):
Video length is 1:12:33.
John Durant, Director of the MIT Museum, describes the protocol for the Soap Box event and then introduces Nancy Kanwisher.
At 3:00, Nancy Kanwisher begins (following the resolution of audio problems).
At 18:25, Durant invites audience members to submit questions.
At 19:11, Durant reads some of these questions.
At 20:50, Kanwisher responds.
At 31:22, Durant introduces a second set of questions, and audience members also pose questions. The event continues to alternate between audience questions and written questions.
The information on this page was accurate as of the day the video was added to MIT World. This video was added to MIT World on 2006-07-09.
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