I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

An emerging class of theories concerning the functional structure of the brain takes the reuse of neural circuitry for various cognitive purposes to be a central organizational principle. According to these theories, it is quite common for neural circuits established for one purpose to be exapted (exploited, recycled, redeployed) during evolution or normal development, and be put to different uses, often without losing their original functions. Neural reuse theories thus differ from the usual understanding of the role of neural plasticity (which is, after all, a kind of reuse) in brain organization along the following lines: According to neural reuse, circuits can continue to acquire new uses after an initial or original function is established; the acquisition of new uses need not involve unusual circumstances such as injury or loss of established function; and the acquisition of a new use need not involve (much) local change to circuit structure (e.g., it might involve only the establishment of functional connections to new neural partners). Thus, neural reuse theories offer a distinct perspective on several topics of general interest, such as: the evolution and development of the brain, including (for instance) the evolutionary-developmental pathway supporting primate tool use and human language; the degree of modularity in brain organization; the degree of localization of cognitive function; and the cortical parcellation problem and the prospects (and proper methods to employ) for function to structure mapping. The idea also has some practical implications in the areas of rehabilitative medicine and machine interface design.

/pdf/neural-reuse-a-fundamental-organizational-principle-of-the-192fyqv3bk.pdf

Neural reuse: A fundamental organizational principle of the brain.

The superior colliculus is a laminated midbrain structure that acts as one of the centers organizing gaze movements. This review will concentrate on sensory and motor inputs to the superior colliculus, on its internal circuitry, and on its connections with other brainstem gaze centers, as well as its extensive outputs to those structures with which it is reciprocally connected. This will be done in the context of its laminar arrangement. Specifically, the superficial layers receive direct retinal input, and are primarily visual sensory in nature. They project upon the visual thalamus and pretectum to influence visual perception. These visual layers also project upon the deeper layers, which are both multimodal, and premotor in nature. Thus, the deep layers receive input from both somatosensory and auditory sources, as well as from the basal ganglia and cerebellum. Sensory, association, and motor areas of cerebral cortex provide another major source of collicular input, particularly in more encephalized species. For example, visual sensory cortex terminates superficially, while the eye fields target the deeper layers. The deeper layers are themselves the source of a major projection by way of the predorsal bundle which contributes collicular target information to the brainstem structures containing gaze-related burst neurons, and the spinal cord and medullary reticular formation regions that produce head turning.

The mammalian superior colliculus: laminar structure and connections.

This year, the field of neuroscience celebrates the 50th anniversary of Mountcastle's discovery of the cortical column In this review, we summarize half a century of research and come to the disappointing realization that the column may have no function Originally, it was described as a discrete structure, spanning the layers of the somatosensory cortex, which contains cells responsive to only a single modality, such as deep joint receptors or cutaneous receptors Subsequently, examples of columns have been uncovered in numerous cortical areas, expanding the original concept to embrace a variety of different structures and principles A ‘column’ now refers to cells in any vertical cluster that share the same tuning for any given receptive field attribute In striate cortex, for example, cells with the same eye preference are grouped into ocular dominance columns Unaccountably, ocular dominance columns are present in some species, but not others In principle, it should be possible to determine their function by searching for species differences in visual performance that correlate with their presence or absence Unfortunately, this approach has been to no avail; no visual faculty has emerged that appears to require ocular dominance columns Moreover, recent evidence has shown that the expression of ocular dominance columns can be highly variable among members of the same species, or even in different portions of the visual cortex in the same individual These observations deal a fatal blow to the idea that ocular dominance columns serve a purpose More broadly, the term ‘column’ also denotes the periodic termination of anatomical projections within or between cortical areas In many instances, periodic projections have a consistent relationship with some architectural feature, such as the cytochrome oxidase patches in V1 or the stripes in V2 These tissue compartments appear to divide cells with different receptive field properties into distinct processing streams However, it is unclear what advantage, if any, is conveyed by this form of columnar segregation Although the column is an attractive concept, it has failed as a unifying principle for understanding cortical function Unravelling the organization of the cerebral cortex will require a painstaking description of the circuits, projections and response properties peculiar to cells in each of its various areas

The cortical column: a structure without a function

Development of human visual function.

Infant temporal contrast sensitivity functions (tCSFs) mature earlier for luminance than for chromatic stimuli: evidence for precocious magnocellular development?

In visual area V2 of macaque monkeys, cytochrome oxidase (CO) histochemistry reveals a pattern of alternating densely labeled thick and thin stripe compartments and lightly labeled interstripe compartments. This modular organization has been associated with functionally separate pathways in the visual system. We examined this idea further by comparing the pattern of CO stripes with the distribution of neurons in V2 that project to the superior colliculus. Visually evoked activity in the superior colliculus is known to be greatly reduced by blocking magnocellular but not parvocellular layers of the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN). From previous evidence that V2 thick stripes are closely associated with the magnocellular LGN pathway, we predicted that a significant proportion of V2 neurons projecting to the superior colliculus would reside in the thick stripes. To test this prediction, the tangential distribution of retrogradely labeled corticotectal cells in V2 was compared with the pattern of CO stripes. We found that neurons projecting to the superior colliculus accumulated preferentially into band-like clusters that were in alignment with alternate CO dense stripes. These stripes were identified as thick stripes on the basis of their physical appearance and/or by their affinity to the monoclonal antibody Cat-301. A significantly smaller proportion of labeled cells was observed in thin and interstripe compartments. These data provide further evidence that the spatial distribution of subcortically projecting neurons can correlate with the internal modular organization of visual areas. Moreover, they support the notion that CO compartments in V2 are associated with functionally different pathways.

Distribution of neurons projecting to the superior colliculus correlates with thick cytochrome oxidase stripes in macaque visual area v2

While much attention has been given to the correlation between cytochrome-oxidase (CO) compartments and patterns of cortico-cortical projections originating from supragranular layers in the striate cortex, little is known in this regard about patterns of cortico-subcortical projections originating from infragranular cortex. We studied the tangential distribution of the striate cortex neurons projecting to the superior colliculus and used two approaches to analyze the relationship of this distribution to the arrangement of CO "blobs." First, chi-square analysis indicated that significantly fewer labeled neurons were found within the CO blob compartment than the number expected for a random distribution. Second, spatial cross-correlation analysis--which circumvents the inherent subjectivity of delineating blob boundaries--revealed an area around blob centers in which there was a decreased probability of encountering labeled cells. The size of this area compared well with that of our outlines of CO blobs. We conclude that corticotectal projection neurons in the striate cortex are distributed preferentially within the interblob compartment of the infragranular striate cortex. These results demonstrate that the spatial distribution of cortico-subcortical projection neurons within infragranular cortex can correlate with the CO architecture of the primary visual cortex.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0952523800008130

The distribution of corticotectal projection neurons correlates with the interblob compartment in macaque striate cortex

Ontogeny and ontology: Ontophyletics and enactive focal vision

Infants code the direction of chromatic quadrature motion

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