Semir Zeki - Scientific Achievements

Scientific Achievements

Zeki's scientific achievements include:

• Discovery of the many visual areas of the brain and their functional specialisation for different visual attributes such as colour and motion.
• Finding neurons in a part of the monkey visual system that would respond only when a particular colour, rather than a particular wavelength, was in their receptive fields. For example, he showed that a red-sensitive neuron would continue to respond to a red stimulus, even when it was illuminated mainly by green light. This was the first study relating colour perception to single cell physiology in the brain.
• Showing that processing sites in the visual brain are also perceptual sites.
• Showing that we see different attributes of visual input at different times.
• Charting the activity of the brain in time and showing that different visual areas have different activity time courses.
• Studying the neural correlates of subjective mental states, such as love and beauty, and more recently, hate

His work has led him to believe that all major artists are instinctive neuroscientists with an innate understanding of how the human brain looks at the world. He claims they are consistently trying to find a visual language for those concepts because, according to Zeki, seeing is not a passive process.