Are neurons organized like roads?
Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology? And have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about? Please send suggestions to Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist at the Boston Globe. He can be reached at garethideas AT gmail.com or Twitter @garethideas.
Partha Mitra is Crick-Clay Professor at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He obtained a PhD in Physics at Harvard, was a member of the Theoretical Physics group at Bell Laboratories, and has a broad spectrum of interests.
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5 Comments
Add CommentVery informative. Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGood article, Walter Schneider, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh is doing some interesting work in this area, with one of the first applications being in the precise location of tumors prior to surgery so that important bundles can be avoided.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHe has also been scanning Temple Grandin's brain to advance the understanding of autistic brains.
I noticed the tendency towards orthogonality of nerve fiber tracts in cultures of dissociated dorsal root ganglia 45 years ago. You can find very clear pictures of silver stained preparations in my 1967 thesis "The morphological and electrophysiological characteristics of dissociated dorsal root ganglia in cell culture". I hypothesized a mechanism involving the fact that the nerve fibers tend to grow along contours or fibrin lattices created by the growing sheets of non-neuronal cells. The linear arrangements of the sheets of such cells is a common observation. At a meeting of the then nascent neural culture group, I proposed that a similar mechanism was involved in neuronal pathway guidance in the CNS. The idea was generally well received by the group which included Stanley Crain and his colleagues with the exception of one neurologist. I probably have unconsciously repressed his name (I am now a semi retired clinical psychologist in Singapore). I often thought that this glial generated orthogonality was a really important idea but at that time there was no method for investigating the mechanism in situ. That is changing as your informative article points out. I look forward to the future investigation of this phenomenon.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWould love to hear from others about this idea.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDr. Brian Scott
imaginar uma rede de fios é ultrapassado.A comunicação dos neuronios usa e via bluetooth.
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