Herophilus (ca. 330 to ca. 260 BC) was one of Hellenistic -Alexandria's renowned scholars, a leading physician, often named the 'Father of Anatomy'. From cadaveric dissections and possibly vivisection Herophilus considered the ventricles to be the seat of the soul, intelligence and mental functions. Herophilus introduced the term rete mirabile found in ungulates but not in man, as opposed to Ga...

Need-to-know facts about the nervous system: fundamentals The nervous system can be divided into three main anatomical divisions: • the central nervous system (CNS): consists of the brain, brainstem and spinal cord • the peripheral nervous system (PNS): comprising the nerves that leave the brainstem and the spinal cord • the autonomic nervous system (ANS): includes the sympathetic and parasympa...

Learning functional neuroanatomy requires forming mental representations of 3D structure, but such from 2D textbook diagrams can be challenging. We address this challenge in the UW Virtual Brain Project by developing narrated diagrams, which are interactive, guided tours through models perceptual systems. Lessons experienced virtual realty (VR) or on a personal computer monitor (PC). predicted ...

This volume is a report of a meeting sponsored by the March of Dimes-Birth Defects Foundation at the University of California, San Diego, in June of 1981. It consists of a series of original papers which were presented at the conference and is divided into two sections: one on syndromes and the second on cytogenetics. A large variety of interesting papers on the subject of dysmorphology discuss...

Three important developments have occurred in the area of memory during the past decade. The first was the recognition that there is more than one kind of memory (Cohen 1984; Schacter 1987; Squire 1982; Tulving 1985). Declarative memory (or, explicit memory) affords the capacity for conscious recollections about facts and events. This is the kind of memory that is usually referred to when the t...

The autonomic nervous system, especially the sympathetic nervous system, regulates immune responses, while cytokines produced in the immune system also affect neuronal activities. Stress-induced expression of immediate early genes, such as c-Fos in the brain, and the viral transneuronal labeling using pseudorabies virus make it possible to analyze the neurocircuitry of the stress-related centra...

" Contemporary neuroscience is in urgent need of a new generation of neuroanatomical techniques allowing scalable, reliable, specific, and quantitative analysis of macroscopic portions of brain tissue with cellular or sub-cellular resolution. " In this first sentence of their Discussion, Silvestri et al. (2015) succinctly set forth the key issues of their contributing article; namely, visualiza...

To our ancient ancestors, the mass of gelatinous tissue between our two ears was a mystery for the most part; its importance, nevertheless, was underscored by the serious consequences of damage to it. Several thousand years later, the brain still represents one of the frontiers of biomedicine, a mystery which is tenaciously guarded behind layers of neurobiological riddle. Our first understandin...