It is nice to spot a familiar face in a crowd of unknowns. But how do we do that? And why do people who recover sight after years of blindness continue to have problems with perception? These are some of the questions Pawan Sinha and his lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are trying to unfold. Growing up in the IIT Delhi campus,where his father worked in the administrative section,he went on to get a B.Tech from the institute before moving to the US to pursue a masters degree in artificial intelligence,the subject in which he also earned a doctorate. Then he joined MIT as faculty in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences,where he began studying visual perception. I have always been interested in understanding the roots of intelligence, he says. As an amateur artist,I was curious to understand how good painters are able to convey the essence of objects with very few brush strokes. This led to my interest in visual perception and the deeper questions of how our brains make sense of the complex information they get from sensory organs. Even though he was initially associated with the computer science department,Sinha was fascinated by the workings of the brain and began delving into them. The scientist,who is married to Pamela Lipson-Sinha (also a Ph.D. from MIT),juggles teaching,mentoring and research at the institute. A major part of his research involves studying how the brain perceives and decodes objects. With the aid of computer applications,Sinhas lab is trying to build models of the brains visual circuitry. The 2007 recipient of the Troland Research Award,Sinha recently launched Project Prakash in India. It is a humanitarian project aimed at providing treatment to blind children in remote parts of India,which is home to 30 per cent of the worlds blind. The project also provides an important scientific opportunity for his lab. Sinhas findings,as part of Project Prakash,shed new light on long-held views on the so-called critical periods of visual learning. Hubel and Wiesel had earlier found that when one eye of a new-born kitten is shut for a long time,it turns blind in that eye,never recovering sight after the eye is opened. However,the closing of an eye did not have any significant effect on adult kittens,giving birth to the idea of critical periods. Sinhas research has found that human brains are much more flexible when it comes to visual learning. Our work is actually suggesting a rethinking of the classical notion of critical periods, he says. Some of the beneficiaries of the project have shown a remarkable ability to adapt visually to the world even though they were born blind or blinded young in life. This information will be very useful for designing targeted training and rehabilitation routines to help the formerly blind gain maximal functionality as soon as possible, Sinha says. The associate professor of vision and computational neuroscience now wants to expand his research into autism to get a better understanding of the disorder and devise therapeutic interventions for it. Also among his plans is a venture called Prakash Center for Children,which he is trying to establish as a world-class treatment facility for disabled children in India. Besides a paediatric hospital,Sinha also wants to set up a school to provide basic education to children. It is a very ambitious undertaking, he says,But it can have a dramatic impact in improving the lives of hundreds of thousands of children who suffer from various disabilities in our country and are too poor or too far away to obtain medical care.
