As they said later in the paper, “While … cells of different ocular dominance were present within single columns, there were nevertheless indications of some grouping” (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962). Ocular dominance columns were later found to be clearer and more distinct in the monkey (Hubel and Wiesel, 1968). Finally, they found that retinotopic organization of a column is disorganized, so that “at this microscopic level the retinotopic representation no longer strictly holds” (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962). As Hubel and Wiesel pointed out, the CT99021 fine-scale functional architecture of visual cortex, with its homogeneous orientation selectivity and

disorganized retinotopy, might play an important role in information processing. “At

first sight it would seem necessary to imagine a highly intricate tangle of interconnexions in order to link cells with common axis orientations while keeping those with different orientations functionally separated … The cells of each aggregate have common axis orientations and the staggering in the positions of the simple fields is roughly what is required to account for the size of most of the complex fields” (Hubel and Wiesel, 1962). It is crucially important to emphasize that Hubel and Wiesel did not intend functional architecture to be synonymous with the existence of distinct columns for orientation selectivity. It was instead a general construct to help understand click here the relationship between function and anatomy. The term functional architecture might be used to express simple ideas: neurons with the same preferred orientation clump together. But it also encompassed more complex ideas: a precise map for orientation combined with an imprecise map for retinotopy might help in the construction of complex receptive fields. Taken more generally, the concept of functional architecture provided a framework for linking

the anatomy of a cortical circuit with the physiological transformations performed by that circuit. But the exact relationship between functional architecture, neural connections, and the physiological function of individual cells could only be speculated upon in 1962. Hubel and Wiesel could put forward SPTLC1 their hierarchical models of simple and complex receptive fields in the cat (Figure 1), but these models were presented as conjecture: simple cells might create orientation selectivity by adding synaptic signals from lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) cells whose receptive fields line up in a row; complex cells might generalize orientation selectivity by adding synaptic signals from simple cells tuned to a single orientation. But only recently is it becoming possible to study the detailed interrelationships between physiology and wiring diagrams at the single-cell level, a line of inquiry that has been given a new name, functional connectomics (a term that would have made Hubel and Wiesel shudder in 1962).