Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
"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.