A program of exploration
On an overcast Wednesday at Harvard Medical School, 15 first-year College students crowd around one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists and listen to the sound of brain cells firing. “The demonstration was to show students that our eyes move, even when we’re looking at an object that’s fixed in space,” says David Hubel, John Enders University Professor of Neurobiology, Emeritus, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in medicine, and leader of a freshman seminar on the neurophysiology of visual perception. “The clicks they heard on my computer’s speakers were impulses from the brain of a monkey that was looking at a light line on a dark background. Every time the animal’s eyes moved, its brain cells fired. This is how we learn about the way the brain processes visual information.” Hubel is one of dozens of senior faculty across the University who participate in the Freshman Seminar Program for the joy of...