And what they found was that suddenly a neuron fired.
Now, they had no idea why.
They said, why is, why is this neuron firing?
I, I, they hadn't presented anything different than they had before, so
it was the same objects they used.
What they figured out was and this used to happen quite often for
anybody who might remember using these slide projectors is that.
You know, these slides would pop out.
And those were real pain.
I mean, you, people would be presenting these slides and
then this, this thing would get jammed and you'd have to go and
work on the slides and get them to work right.
And then the apparatus would work again.
That was a physical slide projector, right?
So the slide had popped out and created an edge.
And in fact, what the brain cells were responding to was this edge,
the difference between light and
dark caused by this this edge of the actual slide popping out.
An interesting lesson for
those of, of us who always want to find exactly what we expect to find.
In this case, it was some mistake the actual popping out of this slide that led
them to discover and then eventually, discover these edge detectors, right.
And eventually, led to a Nobel Prize.
So it's interesting that, that would happen by chance.
And so what they did then was they began to look at what would happen if
they did different forms of visual deprivation.
If they covered up an eye for some period of time or
if they had a cat that was raised in essentially like a stroboscopic light and
then the kind that makes people look like they're moving in slow motion.
Maybe you've seen that at a, at a club.
Right?
And so they had cats either have visual deprivation of an eye input or
brought up in strobo, stroboscopic light.
And they found that there were certain periods which if the eye was covered or
the light was less than ideal, there would be permanent affects in vision.
Right.
These are called sensitive periods, right?
And, and, and the case of the visual system, their seem to be
these critical periods where visual stimulation is very important.
Otherwise, what happens is visual development never ever
seems to occur naturally.
The sensitive or critical periods have been seen in many different types of
animals, in many different types of domains involved you know,
auditory processing, visual processing.
Even in motor processing, there are sensitive periods.
So for example, if there is deprivation or there is binocu binocular vision.
Right. So we see right, essentially two
2D images that are slightly off and, and that creates a 3D image.
If that's slightly off, right?
Such that we can't see these images as clearly as infants and
that's why this needs to be corrected very early in children.