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Major Brain Pathway Rediscovered After Century-old Confusion, Controversy
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.
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?
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.
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".
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age