Richard Marx Held (October 10, 1922 – November 22, 2016) was an American professor (emeritus at the time of his death) of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[9][10] After graduating from Columbia University and spending two years in the U.S. Navy as a radar officer, Held was invited to join Wolfgang Köhler at Swarthmore College.
[11] Robert Wurtz later described their research as a precursor to Hubel and Wiesel's discovery of responses of single cell cortical neurons to light stimuli on the retina.
The kittens were exposed to light only under regulated test conditions to allow Held to examine the correlation between movement and sight in vision development.
[15] Held worked with Ernst Pöppel and Douglas Frost in 1983 in an experiment examining brain injured individuals who appeared blind but still showed localized responses to light.
[16] Held was an adjunct professor at the New England College of Optometry pursuing the study of the development of myopia revealed by aging subjects.
[17] MIT Professor Emeritus Held[1] worked with Pawan Sinha researching in India to answer Molyneux's Question through Project Prakash.
In this work, blind children are restored to sight and to the ability to be tested if the beginning of spatial vision requires movement-produced stimuli to develop visual capabilities.
Held was working with the staff of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary to develop tests for detecting visual abnormalities in infants and children in 1984.
[15] Molyneux posed the question: In Held's work with Project Prakash, five patients from age 8 to 17 received surgery to correct blindness and become fully sighted.