NEUR 2600 Lecture Notes - Gerald Edelman, Konrad Lorenz, Harry Harlow
Document Summary
His discovery: if you took baby geese and hatched them, they"d follow you around and imprint on you thinking you were the mother goose. Something about brain just after birth to latch onto something. Wait a little longer, loses capacity to imprint. Younger is better, things can only happen at some age. If the right experiences happen, the brain changes. Respond to seek out consistency, and eventually they end up with a proper pattern. The retinal ganglion cells that project to the tectum send out random axons, which then are pruned to their adult pattern through visual experiences. White is the input from one visual field, and the black is the input from the other. You would think in an adult brain that it"s wired that way. The left and right eye form alternating columns called ocular dominance columns in the visual cortex. The absence of visual input from one eye allows the good eye to expand its territory.
