12 noon Film showing of "The Man Who Learnt to See"
the BBC documentary explores May’s life,
the stem cell transplant surgery that restored
his vision, and scientific research on his
visual perception
3:30 pm Reception
4:00 pm Lecture by Mike May
185 Meeting Street
Events are free and open to the public.
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excerpt:
The empiricist philosopher John Locke first
addressed the issue of whether experience is
important in the development of vision in 1694. The
question was originally raised in a letter from his
Dublin lawyer friend William Molyneux:
"Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and
taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube
and a sphere of the same metal... and the blind man
made to see. Query, whether by his sight before he
touched them, could he distinguish and tell which
was the globe and which the cube?... The acute and
judicious proposer answers: not. For though he has
attained the experience that what affects his touch,
yet he has not yet attained the experience of how the
globe, how the cube, affects his touch so and so,
must affect his sight, so and so..."
CVR Lecture Series
2009-2010
2009
Sept 17
Moshe Bar, Harvard
Co-sponsor, Dept of Neuroscience
Oct 1
Ching-Hwa Sung, Cornell
Co-sponsor, Dept of Neuroscience
Oct 27
Hany Farid, Dartmouth College
Nov 6
Antonio Torralba, MIT
Co-sponsor, Div. of Applied Math
2010
Feb 9
Feb 12
Yann LeCun, NYU
Co-sponsor, Div. of Applied Math
March 9
Range and Scope of Human Face
Processing Abilities
March 11
Sabine Kastne, Princeton
Co-sponsor, Dept of Neuroscience
April 5
Alex Todorov, Princeton
Co-sponsor, CLS/CLiPS
April 7
April 22
Randy Buckner, Harvard
Co-sponsor, Neuroscience