June 25, 1981

Jonah Lehrer, the New Yorker staff writer, was born on June 25, 1981. He is the author of several books, (How We Decide (2009), and Imagine (2012) as well as occasional contributor to Wired, Nature and other periodicals. After graduating from Columbia in 2003, with a major in neuroscience, Lehrer studied philosophy at Oxford -- he is uniquely qualified to address both sides of what C.P. Snow called the divide between science and the humanities.

This excerpt is from an account of research into the nature of human sight---

[The world is not formless when for instance we see a Cezanne painting] Instead in our evolved system, the eyeball's map of light is transformed again and again until milliseconds later, the canvases description enters our consciousness.Amid the swirl of color, we see the apple. What happens during this blink of unconscious activity? The first scientific glimpse into how the brain processes the eye's data arrived in the late 1950s, in an astonishing set of experiments by David Hubel and Torsten Weisel. At the time, neuroscience had no idea what kind of visual stimuli the cortex responded to.[they assumed sight was similar to the way a camera take a picture]Yet when scientists tried finding this camera inside the skull, all they found was silence, the electrical stupor of uninterested cells. This was a frustrating paradox. The animal clearly could see, and yet its cells, when isolated with a beam of light [did not set off the sensor attached to the cat brain. However an accidental step in their experiment did:]...
As they had inserted a glass slide into the light projector, they had inadvertently cast “a faint but sharp shadow” onto the cat's retina. It was just a fleeting glint of brightness — a straight line pointed in a single direction — but [pursuing this clue, the scientists ] glimpsed the raw material of vision, and it was completely abstract. Our brain cells were strange things, fascinated not by dots of light [like a camera] but by angles of lines.These neurons preferred contrast over brightness, edges over curves.

This sample of Lehrer's writing appears in Proust Was a Neuroscientist (2007).