Patricia Goldman-Rakic A Remembrance

In the 1960s, scientists were conquering improbable frontiers: the moon was about to be walked upon; the brain cracked open. Neuroscientists were discovering that the secrets of the visual cortex could be broken with single-cell recordings and new anatomical tracing techniques, revealing an extraordinary organization: columns of cells responsive to only one eye; single cells tuned to a specific orientation. But the cortex under study was anesthetized. The Mind was not considered an appropriate topic for neuroscientific inquiry. Schizo-mental hospitals were overflowing with chronically ill patients, little different from Bedlam hundreds of years before. Some were veterans of the pre-Thorazine age Goldman's studies at NIMH continued on adult pri-and wore the scars of frontal lobotomies—a last resort mates, trying to decipher the " fundamental nature " of pre-to control their violent behavior. frontal cortical function. She made increasingly smaller Patricia Shoer Goldman arrived as a Fellow in the lesions and defined the caudal two-thirds of the principal Section of Neuropsychology at the NIMH in 1965. There sulcal cortex as that most critical for the spatial memory was an opening in the lab of Haldor Enger Rosvold, who, deficit. She determined that the task must have both with a handful of others around the world, was studying visuospatial and mnemonic components, or the animal the effects of prefrontal cortical lesions on behavior in would not be impaired. These were her first hints of monkeys. About that time, Walle Nauta wrote that the underlying specificity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. frontal lobe While lesion studies had been the paradigm for the study of frontal lobe, new anatomical tracing methods has remained the most mystifying of the major subdi-were being discovered that would permit unprece-visions of the cerebral cortex. Unlike any of the great cerebral promontories, the frontal lobe appears not dented visualization of brain circuits. In 1974, Pat spent to contain a single sub-field that could be identified a year in Walle Nauta's lab at MIT to learn these tech-with any particular sensory modality, and its entire niques. (She also had an ulterior motive to come to expanse must accordingly be considered associa-Pat injected tritiated amino acids into the sulcus princi-view of this circumstance alone that loss of frontal palis and found stunning results: patches of input in cortex, in primate forms in particular, leads to a complex functional deficit, the fundamental nature of striatum (the very first description of the patch/matrix …