The Blind Cat

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After reading the Sight chapter in The Natural History of the Senses I wanted to explain what I know already from another class I take. I take Brain, Mind, and Behavior and in one of the sections we learned about the different sensory systems. I don’t know why but vision was one of my favorite senses to learn about in this section.
Image result for David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel cat
I learned about different periods in development and how there are critical and sensitive periods. A critical period is a limited time in which an even can occur like the development of synapses in the brain for certain functions.

There is an experiment done by David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel that really interested me about the development of the visual cortex. They took a new born cat and covered one of its eyes for about a year to see if the synapses would still develop. When they took off the cover the cat was blind in that eye. The cat did not develop sight after it was taken off though. There was a critical period where the eye needed visual stimulus to develop synapses in the brain. After that period there was no chance that the cat would develop sight in that eye.


Watson, Neil V., and S. Marc. Breedlove. The Mind's Machine: Foundations of Brain and Behavior. Sinauer Associates, Inc. Publishers, 2018.

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