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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 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.'
Google's dark fiber really is everywhere.
You'd think that we'd have found all the parts of the human body by now ...
This is /. so I'm sure many of us have yet undiscovered parts of the human body...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Ahh, those inquisitive — and well-funded — scientists... The following fortune-cookie came with BSD decades ago:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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?
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.
~Idarubicin
I watched a show a few months back, one of those shows where they talk about people with different/special abilities, synesthesia, a German guy who was blind from birth, but could understand and draw perspective, etc.
There was one study they talked about where they had a group of people who were blind in one eye, but the blindness was the result of a brain injury or defect, not a problem with their actual eyes. In the study, the subjects had their sighted eye covered, and were shown pictures of faces with various emotions/expressions to the blind eye. They found that even though they were blind in that eye, they could still "see" the emotion in the faces and would mimic it on their own face.
Basically, they were saying that the visual signals were getting into the brain and were being interpreted on some level by an unknown part of the brain before getting lost in the damaged visual cortex. I wonder if this has something to do with it?
"it was absent from the literature". A simple Google search shows many articles discussing the "vertical occipital fasciculus" - 265,000 for me:
The article referenced here: http://www.pnas.org/content/ea...
Some other references:
2012: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
http://www.nan.upol.cz/neuro/c...
1943 reference: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.c...
There were a lot more. Something seems fishy here.
My mother likely has a damaged visual cortex. She was born with double vision and had surgery to correct this. Unfortunately, even though the surgery successfully fixed her eyes, she still sees double. She'll see one image up and slightly to the side of the other - all blended together. Don't ask me how she drives, reads, or even maneuvers around. I wouldn't know which objects (seeing two of everything) to avoid but she has adapted and is used to it. She has said that, to her, it seems natural to see 2 of everything since you have two eyes and seeing one just sounds foreign. (3D movies don't work for her, thanks to this though.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I was going to post something to the effect of:
"If 3D movies don't work on her, she probably has limited or no depth perception, which is a huge problem for driving"
BUT
A cursory google search shows stereo vision or depth perception doesn't seem to be a requirement for a driver license, at least in some areas. Only "sufficient vision" and a regular field of view are required. People can get a driver license with only one eye.
Personally, *I* wouldn't feel comfortable driving with limited depth perception, or only one eye, but I'm speaking from the perspective of having both of those things all of my life. I wouldn't feel comfortable doing ANYTHING without depth perception or only having one eye.