The blueprint for modern computer vision wasn't drawn inside a Silicon Valley lab. It was discovered in the brain of a cat. In this episode, we trace one of the most surprising origin stories in artificial intelligence — how a pair of neuroscientists studying feline visual processing in the 1950s accidentally laid the foundation for the technology that now powers facial recognition, self-driving cars, and medical imaging.

We start in the laboratory of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, who in 1959 inserted electrodes into the brains of anesthetized cats and made a Nobel Prize-winning discovery: the visual cortex processes information through a hierarchy of specialized neurons. Simple cells detect specific edge orientations within small receptive fields, while complex cells aggregate those signals into broader, more flexible pattern recognition ...