Peter Orlebar Bishop 1917–2012

Abstract

Peter Orlebar Bishop was an Australian neurophysiologist renowned for his ingenious quantitative approach to study of the mammalian visual system and great ability to attract a large number of talented people to visual research. Peter's research was based on specially designed, precise instrumentation and data quantification applied mainly to analysis of the response properties of single neurones in the principal dorsal thalamic visual relay nucleus, the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus (LGNd) and the primary visual cortex. This quantitative bent was evident throughout Bishop's entire research career:starting with the design and construction of innovative DC amplifiers; through to his quantitative analysis of optics—‘schematic eye' for the cat, which rivaled Gullstrand's schematic eye for humans; to creating and demonstrating validity of the concept of ‘projection lines' in the representation of contralateral visual field in different cellular layers of the LGNd of mammals with frontally positioned eyes and discovery of a very substantial binocular input to single LGNd neurones. The engineering approach of Peter was probably at its heuristic peak when it revealed many details of binocular interactions at the level of single neurones in the primary visual cortex—the interactions that appear to underpin overall mechanisms underlying stereopsis, the high precision binocular depth sense.