Multimedia Collection
Silicon Vision: Computational Neuroscientist Misha Mahowald
(Discovering Women series)
VHS
60 minutes
Q130 .D51 1995 tape 5
As a child, Misha Mahowald went on a ride at Disneyland where visitors were "shrunk down" into "water molecules." Being only a child, she thought what she was seeing was real. "The world suddenly was much more interesting than I'd been led to believe, because there were all these things that were normally invisible that were really there," she remembers. Today, Mahowald brings the same delighted curiosity to her work as a young scientist in a very young field, computational neuroscience, a combination of computer science and biology. Although she is only 29 years old, she has already played a major part in the development of a silicon retina, a tiny computer chip that reacts to light as the eye's retina does. A ghostly, flickering image of Mahowald as seen by this retina wavers on the computer screen as she works on her next project: building a silicon neuron. It's the next step towards building an entire visual network - and maybe, someday, a human brain - on computer chips.
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