Nobel Prize winner David Hubel dies at 87

David Hubel, a Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist whose astonishing map of the visual cortex pulled back the curtain on one of the brain's most mysterious functions, the power of sight, died Sept. 22 in Lincoln, Mass. He was 87.

The cause was kidney failure, said his son Paul Hubel.

Starting in the late 1950s, Hubel's research revealed the architecture of the visual cortex, the region of the brain that receives floods of data gathered by the eyes.

Together with Swedish neurophysiologist Torsten Wiesel, he discovered how nerve cells -- neurons -- analyze the light rays that hit our retinas, bit by bit, to assemble the detailed, moving and almost infinitely diverse final images that we perceive as our external world.

Over 25 years of work together, the men revealed that the cortex is arranged in vertical columns of cells, each module devoted to process a different constituent of the seen world: form, contour, color, movement and three-dimensionality.

For their collaboration, begun at Johns Hopkins University and carried out for the next two decades at Harvard Medical School, Hubel and Wiesel won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. They shared the prize with Roger Sperry, then affiliated with the California Institute of Technology.

When the men began studying the visual system, little was known about the functional organization of the cerebral cortex, and scientists had only recently begun recording electrical impulses from that highest and most complex area of the brain. The Nobel Prize committee cited the two men's research as having "disclosed one of the most well guarded secrets of the brain: the way by which its cells decode the message which the brain receives from the eyes."