3.6 - Orientation Selectivity

Dear Viewers of these Videos-
These lectures are from my undergrad course The Human Brain, currently being taught in the spring of 2018 at MIT. Lectures will be added as the course proceeds.
Over time I intent to expand, revise, and improve this set of lectures, for which I would welcome your feedback. If you are a newcommer to these topics and find parts unclear or boring pelase let me know. If you are in the field I would particularly appreciate hearing about any errors you catch or any content that you think should be added or removed.
Nancy

Description of MIT Course 9.11: The Human Brain
The last quarter century has revealed the functional organization of the human brain in glorious detail, including an unexpectedly precise mapping of specific perceptual and cognitive functions to particular cortical regions. This course surveys the core perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human mind and asks how they are implemented in the brain. Specifically, we will explore in some detail a number of distinct domains of cognition like face recognition, navigation, number, language, music, and social cognition, and the cortical regions and networks that implement these functions. Key themes include the representations, development, and degree of functional specificity of these components of mind and brain. The course also emphasizes the inferences that can (and cannot) be drawn from each of the main methods in human cognitive neuroscience. The course will take students straight to the cutting edge of the field, empowering them to understand and critically evaluate empirical articles in the current literature.

[DbaybledD]

Just reaching out Nancy to say thank you. I was born with some degree of seeing 'visual snow' and after taking LSD, which I still quite enjoy, it has definitely increased my perception of visual snow, but also had some weird effects on edge detection (straight lines widening) under stressful or creative periods. After watching these lectures, it is my belief that my V1 area is the reason for this, and it affects both the intensity and orientation of the perceived field.

You might be wonder, do I feel damaged or discriminated? Not a chance. You have no idea what it's like to experience abstract art like this. Picasso, Pollock and Kandinsky all activate the V1 area in an extremely marked way now, in comparison to beforehand. I know this because during my first ever trip, I stopped and looked at a Kandinsky. Since that point in time, I always find particular artworks of his or other abstract artists to give a greater sense of meaning, as in, my brain in interpreting more data from one particular type of artwork in a unique way and I have associated more meaning with that.

[drakonzebra]

Can somebody explain 10:55? Why are the receptive fields rectangular? What do the 3 bars side-by-side represent?

[martinfultot]

I have to say, all the metaphors about a conscious homunculus somewhere downstream the brain, neurons liking instead of firing, etc. don't help at all. And to try to explain the tilt after effect without first explaining that there is refraction and lateral inhibition only makes students confused. And this is MIT...

[JohnSmith-gput]

Does it matter the colour of the oriented bar / color of background? Can't find this info anywhere.

[TheFreddieFoo]

Does anyone have that extended movie which showed the experiment shown around 1:45?