Alan Cowey (1935–2012)

Alan's work was necessarily interdisciplinary because he saw no way of understanding anatomy, physiology or behaviour without understanding all of them. Hence his work on visual plasticity and development incorporated retinal and collicular anatomy, lesion studies and neuropsychological work with patients. This led him to take up the discovery of blindsight by Larry Weiskrantz, his graduate supervisor, and carry out seminal work on the anatomical basis of the phenomenon. His work on blindsight was inspired both by basic scientific questions and clinical possibilities. Of this work, Trevor Robbins commented: " His insights into the phenomenon of 'blindsight', through experiments with impeccable logic and elegant design, have led us to a new understanding of the functional organisation of the primate visual system. " Alan sometimes referred to himself as a 'dabbler' and suggested that he might be spreading himself too thin. It would be more accurate to say that he always had the many parts of a big picture in mind. Alan never discarded a good idea. It became part of a rich intellectual soup. Another perspective on the breadth of his work is that, in his own words " I liked doing new things, even at the risk of being criticized — as I have been. " And by new things he meant " sea change rather than a slight veer ". His intellectual courage was put to the test many times. In 1967 he was on sabbatical in Harvard, working with Charlie Gross, and while there had been offered tenure in Cambridge; at the same time, Larry Weiskrantz offered Alan a position in Oxford: " It was a straight choice between a secure post in Cambridge, with an attached College Fellowship, and a new start in Oxford at a lower salary, without tenure or a College fellowship but with the prospect of better facilities. " The prospect of better facilities won the day. One wonders how many people would make the same choice. Throughout the 1980s he led a scholarly resistance to oversimplifications of functional specialisation in the visual system in a series of papers on the effects of lesions to V4 and V5. He complemented this approach by extending his work on patients suffering from varieties of Alan Cowey, who died in December, was a leading figure in the field of physiological psychology for four decades and a pioneer in cognitive neuroscience long before the term was coined. …