Schematic diagrams from 19th-century brain atlases showing the vertical occipital fasciculus in the monkey and human brainYEATMAN ET AL., PNAS, 2014While a graduate student at Stanford University, Jason Yeatman discovered what he thought was a new connective brain structure at the back of the brain, a large flat bundle of nerve fibers that links different regions of the visual system. The structure did not appear in any atlas Yeatman checked, and he couldn’t find record of it in the literature. One researcher he’d asked about the structure had a vague memory of it being mentioned in an old medical textbook, sending Yeatman and his colleagues digging through century-old tomes in search of more information.
“With this tip, we found it in a number of atlases from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and this started the detective mission to track down how it disappeared from the modern literature,” Yeatman told The Guardian.
It turns out, the brain structure, known as the vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF), was originally discovered in second half of the 19th century by German neurologist Carl Wernicke, who included it in his 1881 brain atlas. Digging through Stanford’s archives, Yeatman further discovered that Wernicke’s mentor, neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert, may have disregarded the finding because it didn’t fit with his belief that neural pathways moved horizontally across the brain, not vertically, as the VOF did. Or perhaps the structure just didn’t interest him. Whatever the reason, Meynert ...
