Until the late 1700s, the eyes were thought to be the organs of sight while the visual function of the brain remained unclear. Just over a century ago a German professor of physiology, Hermann Munk, argued against scientific community scepticism that because blindness could be caused by damage to the occipital lobes, these anatomical areas must have an important function in vision1. During the Russo–Japanese war of 1904–5, Tatsuji Inouye, a Japanese physician and pioneer vision researcher, began to correlate the visual difficulties of soldiers with their head wounds, thereby increasing our understanding of the role of the brain in vision.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.