British vision scientist (1921?2020)
Horace Basil Barlow
FRS
(8 December 1921 ? 5 July 2020) was a British
vision scientist
.
Early life
[
edit
]
Barlow was the son of the civil servant Sir
Alan Barlow
and his wife
Lady Nora
(granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin).
[1]
[2]
Barlow was the great-grandson of
Charles Darwin
and thus part of the
Darwin ? Wedgwood family
.
He was educated at
Winchester College
where he met and befriend with
Freeman Dyson
. Barlow read natural sciences at
Trinity College, Cambridge
and earned an M.D. at
Harvard University
in 1946.
[3]
Research
[
edit
]
In 1953, Barlow discovered that the
frog
brain has
neurons
which fire in response to specific visual stimuli. This was a precursor to the work of
Hubel
and
Wiesel
on
visual receptive fields
in the visual cortex. He has made a long study of visual inhibition, the process whereby a neuron firing in response to one group of retinal cells can inhibit the firing of another neuron; this allows perception of relative contrast.
In 1961, Barlow wrote a seminal article
[4]
where he asked what the computational aims of the visual system are. He concluded that one of the main aims of visual processing is the reduction of redundancy, which has been extended to the
efficient coding hypothesis
.
[5]
While the brightnesses of neighbouring points in images are usually very similar, the
retina
reduces this redundancy. His work thus was central to the field of
statistics of natural scenes
that relates the statistics of images of real world scenes to the properties of the nervous system.
[
citation needed
]
Barlow also worked in the field of
factorial codes
. The goal was to encode images with
statistically
redundant components or pixels such that the code components are
statistically independent
. Such codes are hard to find but highly useful for purposes such as image classification.
[
citation needed
]
Awards and distinctions
[
edit
]
Barlow was a fellow of
Trinity College
,
University of Cambridge
. He was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society
in 1969 and was awarded their
Royal Medal
in 1993.
[6]
He received the 1993
Australia Prize
(along with
Peter Bishop
and
Vernon Mountcastle
) for his research into the mechanisms of visual perception, and the 2009
Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
[7]
from the
Society for Neuroscience
. He was awarded the first Ken Nakayama Prize from the Vision Sciences Society in 2016.
[8]
Personal life
[
edit
]
Barlow was married twice and fathered seven children.
[1]
In 1954, he married Ruthala Salaman, daughter of M.H. Salaman. They had four daughters: Rebecca, Natasha, Naomi and Emily. They were divorced in 1970. In 1980, he married Miranda, daughter of John Weston-Smith. They had one son, Oscar, and two daughters, Ida and Pepita.
Barlow died on 5 July 2020, at the age of 98.
[9]
Selected publications
[
edit
]
- H. B. Barlow. Possible principles underlying the transformation of sensory messages. Sensory Communication, pp. 217?234, 1961
- H. B. Barlow. Single units and sensation: A neuron doctrine for perceptual psychology? Perception 1(4) 371 ? 394, 1972
- H. B. Barlow, T. P. Kaushal, and G. J. Mitchison. Finding minimum entropy codes. Neural Computation, 1:412-423, 1989.
References
[
edit
]
- ^
a
b
Burr, David; Laughlin, Simon (2020).
"Horace Barlow (1921?2020) [Obituary]"
.
Current Biology
.
30
(16): R907?R910.
doi
:
10.1016/j.cub.2020.07.060
.
PMID
33242002
.
- ^
"Horace Barlow Obituary"
.
The Guardian
. 23 August 2020.
- ^
Husbands, Philip; Holland, Owen; Wheeler, Michael (2008). "An Interview with Horace Barlow".
The Mechanical Mind in History
. MIT Press.
ISBN
9780262083775
.
- ^
Barlow, H. B. (1961),
"Possible Principles Underlying the Transformations of Sensory Messages"
,
Sensory Communication
, The MIT Press, pp. 216?234
, retrieved
20 June
2024
- ^
Binder, Marc D.; Hirokawa, Nobutaka; Windhorst, Uwe, eds. (2009),
"Efficient Coding Hypothesis"
,
Encyclopedia of Neuroscience
, Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, p. 1037,
doi
:
10.1007/978-3-540-29678-2_2901
,
ISBN
978-3-540-29678-2
, retrieved
3 August
2021
- ^
"Fellows"
. Royal Society
. Retrieved
10 December
2010
.
- ^
"Swartz Prize Endowed to Advance Theoretical and Computational Research"
.
www.sfn.org
.
- ^
"VSS 2016 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science ? Horace Barlow"
.
- ^
"Tributes paid to Professor Horace Barlow"
.
Trinity College Cambridge
. 7 July 2020.
External links
[
edit
]
|
---|
International
| |
---|
National
| |
---|
Academics
| |
---|
Other
| |
---|