Horace Basil Barlow FRS (8 December 1921 – 5 July 2020) was a British vision scientist.

Life

Barlow was the son of the civil servant Sir

Alan Barlow Sir James Alan Noel Barlow, 2nd Baronet (25 December 1881 – 28 February 1968) was a British civil servant and collector of Islamic and Chinese art. He was Principal Private Secretary to Ramsay MacDonald, 1933–1934, and later Under-secre ...

and his wife Lady Nora (granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin). He was educated at

Winchester College Winchester College is a public school (fee-charging independent day and boarding school) in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest of the ...

, and earned an M.D. at Harvard University in 1946. Barlow was married twice and had seven children and 13 grandchildren. Barlow died on 5 July 2020, at the age of 98.

Research

In 1953, Barlow discovered that the

frog A frog is any member of a diverse and largely Carnivore, carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians composing the order (biology), order Anura (ανοὐρά, literally ''without tail'' in Ancient Greek). The oldest fossil "proto-f ...

brain has

neurons A neuron, neurone, or nerve cell is an electrically excitable cell that communicates with other cells via specialized connections called synapses. The neuron is the main component of nervous tissue in all animals except sponges and placozoa. N ...

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 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 The efficient coding hypothesis was proposed by Horace Barlow in 1961 as a theoretical model of sensory coding in the brain. Within the brain, neurons communicate with one another by sending electrical impulses referred to as action potentials or ...

. While the brightnesses of neighbouring points in images are usually very similar, the

retina The retina (from la, rete "net") is the innermost, light-sensitive layer of tissue of the eye of most vertebrates and some molluscs. The optics of the eye create a focused two-dimensional image of the visual world on the retina, which then ...

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. Barlow also worked in the field of

factorial code {{Short description, Data representation for machine learning Most real world data sets consist of data vectors whose individual components are not statistically independent. In other words, knowing the value of an element will provide information a ...

s. The goal was to encode images with statistically redundant components or pixels such that the code components are

statistically independent Independence is a fundamental notion in probability theory, as in statistics and the theory of stochastic processes. Two events are independent, statistically independent, or stochastically independent if, informally speaking, the occurrence of o ...

. Such codes are hard to find but highly useful for purposes such as image classification.

Awards and distinctions

Barlow was a fellow of

Trinity College Trinity College may refer to: Australia * Trinity Anglican College, an Anglican coeducational primary and secondary school in , New South Wales * Trinity Catholic College, Auburn, a coeducational school in the inner-western suburbs of Sydney, New ...

University of Cambridge , mottoeng = Literal: From here, light and sacred draughts. Non literal: From this place, we gain enlightenment and precious knowledge. , established = , other_name = The Chancellor, Masters and Schola ...

. He was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

in 1969 and was awarded their

Royal Medal The Royal Medal, also known as The Queen's Medal and The King's Medal (depending on the gender of the monarch at the time of the award), is a silver-gilt medal, of which three are awarded each year by the Royal Society, two for "the most important ...

in 1993. He received the 1993 Australia Prize (along with

Peter Bishop Peter Bishop is a fictional character of the Fox television series ''Fringe''. He is portrayed by Joshua Jackson Joshua Carter Jackson (born June 11, 1978) is a Canadian-American actor. He is known for his starring role as Charlie Conway in ...

and

Vernon Mountcastle Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was an American neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral co ...

) for his research into the mechanisms of visual perception, and the 2009

Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience The Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, established in 2008, is an annual award supported by the Swartz Foundation and administered by the Society for Neuroscience. The award "honors an individual whose activities have produ ...

from the

Society for Neuroscience The Society for Neuroscience (SfN) is a professional society, headquartered in Washington, DC, for basic scientists and physicians around the world whose research is focused on the study of the brain and nervous system. It is especially well kn ...

. He was awarded the first Ken Nakayama Prize from the Vision Sciences Society in 2016.

Family

Barlow was married twice and fathered seven children. 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 was the great-grandson of

Charles Darwin Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended fr ...

and thus part of the

Darwin — Wedgwood family Darwin may refer to: Common meanings * Charles Darwin (1809–1882), English naturalist and writer, best known as the originator of the theory of biological evolution by natural selection * Darwin, Northern Territory, a territorial capital city i ...

Selected publications

*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

External links

''Horace Barlow (1921–2020).''
Current Biology, Vol. 30, 16, p. PR907-R910, August 17, 2020.
List and full text of Horace Barlow publications
* Australia Prizebr>Biography of Barlow

Horace Barlow in Neurotree

Interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 5 March 2012 (video)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Barlow, Horace Basil 1921 births 2020 deaths Australian neuroscientists Australian people of English descent Australia Prize recipients Darwin–Wedgwood family Fellows of the Royal Society Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge Harvard Medical School alumni Royal Medal winners Vision scientists People educated at Winchester College Younger sons of baronets 20th-century British medical doctors British expatriates in the United States