I’m not the lucky owner of an Ipad, but I did enter every
possible raffle, lottery and prize quiz at this conference to
increase my chances of finally getting one. Until then my
notepad made of paper will do just fine. You might think that I
am thoroughly outdated, but then you would actually be mistaken.
You see, tablets are much much older than pen and paper. Around
the 8th century BC, the old greeks used a wax tablet and a
stylus to take notes on, whereas paper came around in the 2nd
century AD. The tabula (how the Greeks called their wax tablet)
was an inexpensive way to take notes and wipe it clean by just
heating up the wax, creating a tabula rasa. Neuroscientists
think of something very different when they use those words. At
least when I hear them I think about experience-dependent and
-independent mechanisms that sculpt the developing brain. This
morning, David Fitzpatrick gave a very nice talk on just that.
How much of the features encoded in our visual cortex require
the circuitry to be sculpted by