It seems immediately obvious that the apple in my hand is the same apple I just picked up from the table. How can my brain recognize an object despite substantial variation in its location, size, and context? In a series of cortical areas known as the ventral stream, the brain performs sophisticated computations that allow us to select things we need to know for object identity (selectivity) while ignoring variations that do not matter (invariance). The brain's capacity to achieve both selectivity and invariance simultaneously remains a fundamental mystery in systems neuroscience.