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A Tradition of Innovation
As pioneers in the field, the people of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are responsible for a number of groundbreaking discoveries and experiments. Among these are the following:
A Tradition of Innovation
As pioneers in the field, the people of MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences are responsible for a number of groundbreaking discoveries and experiments. Among these are the following:
1960s - Hans-Lukas Teuber establishes the discipline of neuropsychology from studies of patients with brain lesions.
1975 - Gerald Schneider proposes the existence of "two visual systems" or parallel pathways for visual processing in the brain.
1982 - David Marr's book, Vision, establishes the computational approach to studying the brain.
1984 - Emilio Bizzi proposes the "equilibrium point" hypothesis for controlling the movement of limbs.
1985 - Ann Graybiel describes the modular organization of brain centers that control movement.
1987 - Kenneth Wexler provides an analysis of how language parameters are learned.
1988 - Tomaso Poggio provides a mathematical description of neural networks and how they work.
1990 - Peter Schiller analyzes the function of parallel visual pathways from eye to brain and within the visual cortex.
1992 - Mriganka Sur demonstrates the tremendous capacity for plasticity in the neocortex by rewiring visual projections to the auditory cortex.
1993 - Susumu Tonegawa shows that deleting genes for certain cellular signals impairs learning in laboratory animals.
1994 - Hermann Steller discovers the gene controlling cell death during development in Drosophila (fruit flies).
1994 - Steven Pinker publishes The Language Instinct, which summarizes the modern view of linguistic theory and language acquisition.
1997 - Earl Miller shows that pathways analyzing the "what and where" of a visual scene are integrated in the prefrontal cortex.
1998 - Nancy Kanwisher discovers areas in the human cerebral cortex dedicated to the analysis of faces and places.
2000 - Matthew Wilson shows that dreaming in laboratory animals involves replay of neural activity in the hippocampus similar to that during learning.
2004 - Mark Bear proposes that metabotropic glutamate receptors and synaptic depression underlie fragile X syndrome.
