Neuroanatomy and Neuroscience

jtotheizzoe:

Phineas Gage’s Connectome

In 1848, railroad worker Phineas Gage had a 3.5-foot, 13 pound tamping iron blown through the front of his skull in a construction accident. Hell of a way to start your Wednesday (yes, I checked). He survived.

The story of Phineas Gage is now the stuff of legend, taught to first-year neuroscience students around the world. How did this man survive a rod through the frontal lobe? Doctors that wrote of him later spoke of extreme behavioral changes, a man who was “. . . fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows”.

Unfortunately, the legend of Phineas Gage’s post-injury brain is largely exaggerated, or at least based on rather thin evidence. But still, he was still a changed man, even if not in the extreme ways his legend suggests.

UCLA’s Jack Van Horn has reconstructed a model of Phineas Gage’s connectome. In the image above, the lower left image shows the “connectogram” of 110 healthy right-handed males, the major highways and byways between brain regions (the brain stem is at 6 o’clock, left and right hemispheres at 9 and 3 o’clock). The lower right image shows the connections that were likely disrupted by the iron spike through Gage’s frontal lobe.

Mo Costandi has a great write-up that you should check out. We now have a map of the damage to Gage’s brain. But do we really know any more about his supposed behavioral changes? Thanks to the exaggerations and sideshow mentality of those who studied hm while alive, likely not.

BONUS: Be sure to check out Robert Krulwich and Carl Zimmer moderating this debate on how much stock we should put in the connectome.

(via Neurophilosophy blog)

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moshita:

allposters

Hospital Morgue Preparing Brain for Autopsy

(Source: under1sky-1destiny, via humanformat)

A toddler rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta)

(Source: funkysafari, via itwasagoodfriday)

neurolove:

Ramón y Cajal draws the hippocampus.  For more information about the hippocampus, see this old post!  If you like making memories, you like your hippocampus.  The hippocampus cycles new information to encode it into memories and then stores it in cortex.  Memories that you’ve made recently are still held in the hippocampus, but older memories are stored in cortex- the place where they were first encoded (i.e. auditory memories would go in the temporal lobe, which is where auditory information is processed).  This is why HM, who had his hippocampus removed, could still remember everything from before about a year before his hippocampus was surgically removed but could not form new memories afterwards.  I’ll talk more about HM another time.

[Image Source]

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nikolawashere:

loooook aaaat iiit ｡◕ ‿ ◕｡

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