David Marr's Vision: floreat computational neuroscience

Abstract

This is a reprint of David Marr’s 1982 book. A foreword placing the book in its historical context is added by Shimon Ullman, and an afterword by Tomaso Poggio is added on some of the themes in the book. David Marr was one of the originators of computational neuroscience, and the useful re-publication of this book enables us to assess how this field is developing, and to put David Marr’s contributions into perspective. David Marr (1945–80) obtained a First Class degree in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 1966; and was sufficiently interested in how the brain works to attend the Part II undergraduate courses in physiology and psychology of the Natural Sciences Tripos. (David was not experienced in practical classes, and happened to be paired with Barbara Rolls, the first female PhD student in physiology at Cambridge, who also sat in on the practical classes and provided expertise partly as a result of her training with Alan Epstein at the University of Pennsylvania.) One of the lecturers in physiology was Giles Brindley, who was interested in vision (as were many of the other members of the Department, including Horace Barlow, Fergus Campbell, William Rushton and John Robson) and in synaptic physiology. [Giles Brindley’s Physiology of the Retina and Visual Pathway (Physiological Society Monograph No. 6, Edwin Arnold, London) appeared in 1970.] Giles Brindley published a paper on how different classes of synapses might show plasticity and contribute to learning in neural networks (Brindley, 1969). These lectures and this work stimulated David’s thinking about synaptic modification and its role in systems in the brain that learn. This led to three seminal papers: on the hippocampus (Marr, 1971), the cerebellum (Marr, 1969) and the neocortex (Marr, 1970). David’s theory of the hippocampus was influenced too at the systems level by …