From: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> To:' Subject: Fwd: Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:09:59 +0000 Forwarded message From: Valentino Braitenberg <valentino.braitenberg@tuebingen mpg.de> Date: Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:49 AM Subject: Re: To: Jeffrey Epstein <[email protected]> There was a time when anatomy was considered a harmless pastime for shaky old grandfathers, while the young and beautiful stuck electrodes in living brains and clapped their hands everytime a spike appeared on the face of their oscilloscopes. It was at that time that I started my research and picked neuroanatomy as my main tool, for two reasons: (a) because I did not have the money to buy an oscilloscope and (b) because I was fascinated by the idea of networks being able to do almost anything, as the emerging science of electronic computers seemed to suggest. The new look at brains in terms of information handling networks proved successful in various ways. I am proud of the following: (1) a very convincing interpretation of the structure of the cerebellum as a time-measuring device with an accuracy of one millisecond or better; (2) an accurate description of a fiber network between the eye and the brain of insects, where each individual fiber is given origin and destination according to a precise scheme derived from geometrical optics; (3) a model of the visual cortex of mammals in complete agreement with the known facts of cortical anatomy and sufficient to explain all the miraculous effects discovered by Hubel and Wiesel, but not explained by them. Besides these results (1), (2), (3) which were original (and in part even shocking) because of the unusual direct translation of anatomical information into functional schemes, we also did some more conventional neuroanatomy, mainly on the cortex (4), with an emphasis on quantitative relations between number and size of elements, as a necessary contribution to general theories of cortical function (such as Hebb's Cell