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Major Brain Pathway Rediscovered After Century-old Confusion, Controversy

Posted by timothy on from the hey-if-you-can-find-a-new-knee-bone dept.

vinces99 writes A couple of years ago a scientist looking at dozens of MRI scans of human brains noticed something surprising: A large fiber pathway that seemed to be part of the network of connections that process visual information that wasn't mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks. "It was this massive bundle of fibers, visible in every brain I examined," said Jason Yeatman, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. "... As far as I could tell, it was absent from the literature and from all major neuroanatomy textbooks.'"With colleagues at Stanford University, Yeatman started some detective work to figure out the identity of that mysterious fiber bundle. The researchers found an early 20th century atlas that depicted the structure, now known as the vertical occipital fasciculus. But the last time that atlas had been checked out was 1912, meaning the researchers were the first to view the images in the last century. They describes the history and controversy of the elusive pathway in a paper published Nov. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You'd think that we'd have found all the parts of the human body by now, but not necessarily.

8 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Wait, what? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, for decades we've had med school people doing dissections, we've had autopsies, we've had people doing MRIs and all sorts of other things ... and we really had a situation where nobody ever put up their hand and said "umm, guys, WTF is this, it's not in the diagram?"

    That's just bizarre to me.

    However this reaffirms the necessity of good old fashioned paper libraries maintained by librarians.

    'Discovering' a piece of anatomy which had been forgotten about for a century isn't something you would do with throwing away your old books and digitizing the new ones.

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    1. Re:Wait, what? by gstoddart · · Score: 4, Insightful

      If I gave you a diagram of an Intel processor and I gave you the schematics there are lots of little differences that only an engineer would notice.

      Dude, we're talking about doctors and neuroscientists here.

      So, I place them firmly in the set of people who should be able to navigate this and would be capable of reading the schematics.

      No one has the schematics for a human brain yet.

      Well, apparently stuff we used to know 100 years ago we no longer know.

      it's just hard to wrap my head around the notion that modern medicine just forgot about this, and haven't had it in their text books for that long.

      Surely at some point someone would have said "Hey, check this out".

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      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Wait, what? by quantaman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      So, for decades we've had med school people doing dissections, we've had autopsies, we've had people doing MRIs and all sorts of other things ... and we really had a situation where nobody ever put up their hand and said "umm, guys, WTF is this, it's not in the diagram?"

      That's just bizarre to me.

      However this reaffirms the necessity of good old fashioned paper libraries maintained by librarians.

      'Discovering' a piece of anatomy which had been forgotten about for a century isn't something you would do with throwing away your old books and digitizing the new ones.

      I'm guessing a couple things happened.

      First I don't know how obvious it is when you're doing an investigation, I wonder if a lot of people probably simply thought it was part of something else.

      The second problem might be overspecialization, everyone focuses on their little section of the brain, and people aren't really doing the dissections poking at physical structures anymore. If it isn't even labelled no one even knows to look for it.

      Still you'd expect people working on surrounding structures to notice something was missing in the neighbourhood. I'm really curious to know what other researchers thought when they looked at the structure.

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      I stole this Sig
    3. Re:Wait, what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I think the science journalism is confusing here.

      For example, with the ALL link that the poster mentioned, the supposedly "new" ligament was well known. It's literally impossible to miss. It was just characterized improperly, and the new characterization suggested a slightly different role in the biomechanics of the knee.

      I'm guessing it was the same with this feature in the brain: people saw the fibrous band, but nobody paid attention to it. It's probably not that it was hidden, it just wasn't described and characterized, including detailing it's relationship to other features. As medical science gets more sophisticated the level of detail and differentiation that we explore will only grow more complex.

    4. Re:Wait, what? by Mashiki · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Those same neurologists are still trying to understand the basic problems of the brain. Like why do people develop MS, but mainly in the norther hemisphere of the world. Or why do we have headaches, why do some people have migraines that go away when they hit puberty and why do some people like me have migraines that get worse with age. I've hit a point where I can no longer function most days, and spend anywhere between 10-25 days on medications to keep the "omg brain exploding" to "omg, the pain...make it stop." It's bad enough that when I walk into emerg, the nurses know me on sight and know what I'm there for.

      It's not uncommon to "lose something" like this in a incredibly complex diagnostic field. Especially when it would have been taught as "common knowledge" and expecting that everyone already knows it. We see this in law too, especially common law where some things are so commonly known for a period that cases don't have to be cited. But then an oddball case comes up, and the original meaning of why xyz happened and is common was lost in the shuffle.

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  2. A cautionary tale ... by jamesl · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's bad enough that everything we know is wrong (Firesign Theater), and that we don't know everything (even though there are those who think they do). It turns out that there's lots of important stuff that we used to know and have forgotten.

    Now, where did I leave my keys?

  3. Re:Link to PNAS article by Trailer+Trash · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Direct link to PNAS abstract.

    Why, why, why is it that Slashdot always reports on new scientific discoveries with a link to a lay press summary or a press release, and never gives us the useful link to the actual papers with the real words by actual scientists? Aaaargh.

    Hey, at least it wasn't Bennet Haselton telling us about it.

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    Do you have ESP?
  4. Re:Debunked? by crunchygranola · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Mod parent up!

    Yes indeed. This seems to be making mountain out of a molehill. Here is the operative phrase I think: "wasn't mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks". This may well be the case - are every know structure commonly included in anatomy textbooks? They aren't, you know, atlases or encyclopedias of neuroanatomy that might be expected to contain everything.

    As AC shows, the bit about "absent from the literature" seems to have been hype.

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    Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age