Bevil Conway

Bevil Conway, b November 4, 1974, Harare (Zimbabwe), neuroscientist and artist. Conway specializes in color perception in his scientific work, and often explores color in his artwork. He is currently Knafel Assistant Professor at Wellesley College.

Conway was educated at McGill University and Harvard University. On finishing his PhD, Conway was elected a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and spent a year as an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the University of Bremen, Germany. Since 2006 he has been Knafel Assistant Professor in the program of Neuroscience at Wellesley College. Conway also helped establish the Kathmandu University Medical School in Nepal, where he taught as Assistant Professor in 2002-03

Science

Conway’s research originally set out to explore the principle of double opponency in the primate visual system, showing (in 2001 and 2006) that color cells in the first stage of cortical processing (V1) compute local ratios of cone activity, making them both color-opponent (red-green and blue-yellow) and spatially-opponent, pinning them down as the likely basis for color constancy and the building blocks for specific hues.

Subsequent work has focused on the representation of color in extrastriate areas of the brain that receive input from V1. In collaboration with Doris Tsao, he used fMRI to identify such functionally defined regions and coined the term “globs” to describe them. In 2007 he used targeted single-unit recording techniques to characterize the behavior of cells in these color areas, showing that individual neurons in these areas respond selectively to specific hues. The behavior of these cells and the networks they are involved in are the current focus of his work.

Art

Much of Conway’s research is guided by the underlying thought that visual art can be used to reveal insights about how visual information is processed. An ongoing research project examines the idea that poor stereopsis may be an asset to artists (the startling finding that Rembrandt may have lacked stereopsis was widely discussed in the media).

As an artist Conway is active in visual media, predominantly watercolors, oils, and prints. A larger, ongoing project is a series of sculptures in the shape glass boxes. His interest is driven by fundamental questions of art making: How do brain and visual apparatus co-operate in making an art object? What is the role of muscle memory in making marks on paper and, more broadly, in the creative process? How do artists challenge the constraints and limitations of our visual system? His works are in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum, private collections in Europe, North America and Africa, and have been featured in books and commercials.

External Links

Wellesley Neuroscience

Boston Globe on Conway

Bevil Conway homepage

Bevil Conway and Eve Marder interviewing choreographer Mark Morris at the Society for Neuroscience