Hubel, David Hunter (1926– )

US neurophysiologist who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981, with Torsten Wiesel and Roger Sperry, for their work on visual perception in which they investigated the physiology of vision and the way in which the higher centres of the brain process visual information.

Hubel was born in Ontario, Canada, and studied at McGill University in Montréal. From 1959 he worked at Harvard, becoming professor in 1965.

At Harvard he met Wiesel, and they began experiments implanting electrodes into the brain of anaesthetized cats, correlating the anatomical structure of the visual cortex of the brain with the physiological responses to different types of visual stimulation. They built up a complex picture of how the brain analysed visual information by an increasingly sophisticated system of detection by the nerve cells.

Later study of the development of the visual system in young animals suggested that eye defects should be treated and corrected immediately, and the then routine ophthalmological practice of leaving a defect to correct itself was abandoned.