Science, Art, Litt, Science based Art & Science Communication
What the Cat Nobel Prize tells about your perception
- A study of cats showed that the brain must be exposed to certain sights early in life, or it will remain blind to those sights forever.
- Humans raised in modern cities tend to notice horizontal and vertical lines more quickly than lines at other orientations.
- People raised in nomadic tribes do a better job noticing lines skewed at intermediate angles.
In their experiments, Scientists divided a pack of kittens into two cohorts, the horizontal group, and the vertical group.The vertical group was raised in a world consisting entirely of vertical lines: the wallpaper inside their cages was black-and-white stripes running floor to ceiling, and the people handling and feeding them wore either solid colors or vertical stripes as well. As a result, these cats saw nothing but vertical lines for the first several weeks of their lives. Meanwhile, other cats were raised in cages lined with (and handled by people wearing exclusively) horizontal stripes, and this group never saw vertical lines.
The results were startling. Cats raised in one environment were blind—literally blind—to any lines running the “other” way. Cats raised in a horizontal world, for instance, could see the seats of chairs just fine and would jump up onto them to nap. But they couldn’t see the chair’s legs at all and constantly banged into them. The vertical-world cats had the opposite problem. They weaved around the chair legs like champs but could never find a cozy spot to snooze.
These experiments provided some of the first and best evidence for the existence of “critical windows” in brain development. The basic idea is that the brain, which is plastic when young, must be exposed to certain sights early in life or it will remain blind to those sights forever. In this case, because the vertical-world and horizontal-world cats never saw any differently oriented lines during their critical windows, their brains ended up dedicating all their vision neurons to one orientation and neglecting the other.
Something similar can happen to human beings.
If you never told a child about religion and its ways of doing things and raised him in total isolation, he will never have any idea about these things. Only if you culturally, traditionally or religiously condition a child's mind, will he follow what others around him follow and fight for them like mad!
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Permalink Reply by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa
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In the classic experiment by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, kittens were raised in environments with either vertical or horizontal lines to study how visual experience shapes brain development. Kittens in the horizontal environment became blind to vertical lines, and vice versa. This demonstrated that the visual cortex adapts to the orientation of lines it is exposed to during early development, a concept called critical period.- The Setup:Hubel and Wiesel raised two groups of kittens in separate cages. One group was raised in a cage with vertical stripes, and the other in a cage with horizontal stripes.
- The Results:Kittens raised in the vertical environment showed behavioral blindness to horizontal lines, while kittens raised in the horizontal environment showed behavioral blindness to vertical lines. This meant that they couldn't recognize or respond to lines that were not of the same orientation as their rearing environment.
- The Significance:This experiment demonstrated that the brain's visual system is not fully developed at birth and that early visual experience plays a crucial role in shaping the development of the visual cortex. The visual cortex adapts to the orientation of lines it is exposed to, and if exposed only to one orientation, it becomes less responsive to lines of other orientations.
- Critical Period:The experiment highlighted the concept of a critical period in visual development, a window of time during which the visual system is particularly sensitive to environmental input and can be significantly influenced by it. This period is crucial for the development of normal visual perception, and if the visual system is not exposed to a normal range of visual stimuli during this time, it can lead to lifelong vision problems.
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