Today, we had an incredible time with Professor Bruno Olshausen who heads the Redwood Center at UC Berkeley, and is Associate Professor, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and School of Optometry, UC Berkeley.
He described the state-of-the-art in the knowledge about the primary visual cortex (V1). Here is the abstract:
Nervous systems have evolved impressive abilities to extract useful information about the environment from images. This talk will review some highlights of what has been learned from a combination of psychophysical, neurophysiological, and computational studies of the visual system, in addition to those aspects that remain a mystery. I will also describe some new organizing principles which provide hope for elucidating the function of visual cortex.