Charles G Gross

• Princeton University

Systematic interest in the functions and diseases of the brain began with the Presocratic natural philosophers and Hippocratic doctors in the sixth to fourth century BCE. It was developed by the Alexandrian anatomists, reaching its peak in Classical science and medicine with Galen in the first century. Greek medical learning was expanded in medieva...

Scientific misconduct has been defined as fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. Scientific misconduct has occurred throughout the history of science. The US government began to take systematic interest in such misconduct in the 1980s. Since then, a number of studies have examined how frequently individual scientists have observed scientific m...

Both intermittent and continuous electrical stimulation of lateral frontal cortex severely impaired delayed alternation performance of overtrained monkeys when tested in a Wisconsin General Test Apparatus. However, a similar effect was not obtained in an automatic delayed alternation apparatus.

Removal of foveal prestriate cortex impairs visual discrimination learning by rhesus monkeys. To test whether this deficit might be due to a “higher-order” foveal scotoma, monkeys with foveal prestriate lesions were forced to fixate extrafoveally by infliction of central retinal lesions. The retinal lesions did not improve their visual discriminati...

In the monkey, foveal prestriate and inferior temporal cortex lesions produce a profound impairment of visual discrimination learning. In this experiment, we examined whether these impairments were associated with a loss of visual sensitivity under conditions of visual masking. Backward masking curves were obtained for two monkeys before and after...

The authors offer a set of cautionary essays on unproven or incorrect claims about the applications of neuroimaging.

A method was developed for obtaining generalization gradients in animals that has considerable advantages over previous methods since it (a) does not involve any prior discrimination training, (b) does not require testing in extinction, and (c) yields repeated daily generalization gradients.

Frequency of spontaneous alternation in a T-maze as a function of intertriai interval was determined for rats with dorsal hippocampal lesions and for controls. The slopes of these two functions were identical, but the curve for the animals with the hippocampal lesions had a lower y intercept, suggesting that hippocampal lesions impair learning rath...

In the long history of the study of the nervous system, there have been a number of major developments that involved radical and permanent changes in fundamental beliefs and assumptions about the nervous system and in tactics and strategies for studying it. These may be termed Revolutions in Neuroscience. This essay considers eight of these, rangin...

Beginning with a consideration of science and culture in early 20th-century Vienna, Kandel explores the interplay of neuroscience, psychology, and art.

Presents an obituary for Bartley Gore Hoebel; 1935-2011. Bart pioneered in the measurement of neurochemical release in local brain sites of freely moving animals. Bart's early research was on the role of the ventromedial and lateral regions of the hypothalamus in the control of eating and satiety. Later he expanded this research to consider other t...

Scientific misconduct, scientific ethics

This chapter suggests that a set of interconnected areas in the primate brain monitors the location and movement of objects near the body, and control flinch and other defensive responses. This hypothesized 'defensive' system includes the ventral intraparietal area (VIP), parietal area 7b, the polysensory zone (PZ) in the precentral gyrus, and the...

Today the fame of Alfred Russell Wallace is as the independent codiscoverer with Charles Darwin of the origin of species by natural selection. Although they were on very amiable terms all their lives, 11 years after announcing their discovery, Wallace and Darwin had a major disagreement on the evolution of human cognition. The author considers how...

Small globular fossils known as Olivooides andMarkuelia from basal Cambrian rocks in China and Siberia, respectively, contain directly developing embryos of metazoans. Fossilization is due to early diagenetic phosphatization. A nearly full developmental sequence of Olivooides can be observed, from late embryonic stages still within an egg membrane,...

Essays on great figures and important issues, advances and blind alleys—from trepanation to the discovery of grandmother cells—in the history of brain sciences. Neuroscientist Charles Gross has been interested in the history of his field since his days as an undergraduate. A Hole in the Head is the second collection of essays in which he illuminate...

Combining a cast of colorful reformers and vivid anecdotes about animals in British life of the 18th and early 19th centuries, Shevelow describes the development of the earliest animal welfare legislation.

Single-cell studies in the macaque have reported selective neural responses evoked by visual presentations of faces and bodies. Consistent with these findings, functional magnetic resonance imaging studies in humans and monkeys indicate that regions in temporal cortex respond preferentially to faces and bodies. However, it is not clear how these ar...

I discuss three examples of neuroscientists whose ideas were ignored by their contemporaries but were accepted as major insights decades or even centuries later. The first is Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) whose ideas on the functions of the cerebral cortex were amazingly prescient. The second is Claude Bernard (1813-1878) whose maxim that the cons...

This paper reviews our experiments on the response properties of single neurons in inferior temporal (IT) cortex in the monkey that were carried out starting in 1965. It describes situational factors that led us to find neurons sensitive to images of faces and hands and summarizes the basic sensory properties of IT neurons. Subsequent developments...

Kluver and Bucy (1938) showed that bilateral removal of the temporal lobes in monkeys produced a constellation of strange symptoms including docility, mouthing uneatable objects, indiscriminate sexuality and the inability to recognize objects visually that became known as the Kluver-Bucy syndrome. Pribram and Mishkin then fractionated this syndrome...

With aging there is a decline in the number of newly generated neurons in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. In rodents and tree shrews, this age-related decrease in neurogenesis is evident long before the animals become aged. No previous studies have investigated whether primates exhibit a similar decline in hippocampal neurogenesis with aging....

In 1870 Gustav Fritsch and Edvard Hitzig showed that electrical stimulation of the cerebral cortex of a dog produced movements. This was a crucial event in the development of modern neuroscience because it was the first good experimental evidence for a) cerebral cortex involvement in motor function, b) the electrical excitability of the cortex, c)...

The cortico-ponto-cerebellar system is one of the largest projection systems in the primate brain, but in the human brain the nature of the information processing in this system remains elusive. Determining the areas of the cerebral cortex which contribute projections to this system will allow us to better understand information processing within i...

The Sensory Hand . Neural Mechanisms of Somatic Sensation. By Vernon B. Mountcastle . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005. 630 pp. $85, £53.95, €78.30. ISBN 0-674-01974-1. Drawing on his career of research into the neurophysiology of sensation, the author provides a detailed consideration of the neural mechanisms that underlie the percep...

The study of the neural basis of face perception is a major research interest today. This review traces its roots in monkey neuropsychology and neurophysiology beginning with the Klüver-Bucy syndrome and its fractionation and then continuing with lesion and single neuron recording studies of inferior temporal cortex. The context and consequence of...

Primates exhibit complex social and cognitive behavior in the wild. In the laboratory, however, the expression of their behavior is usually limited. A large body of literature shows that living in an enriched environment alters dendrites and synapses in the brains of adult rodents. To date, no studies have investigated the influence of living in a...

The functions of prefrontal cortex (PFC) areas are constrained by their anatomical connections. There is little quantitative information about human PFC connections, and, instead, our knowledge of primate PFC connections is derived from tracing studies in macaques. The connections of subcortical areas, in which white matter penetration and hence di...

Human neuroimaging studies suggest that areas in temporal cortex respond preferentially to certain biologically relevant stimulus categories such as faces and bodies. Single-cell studies in monkeys have reported cells in inferior temporal cortex that respond selectively to faces, hands, and bodies but provide little evidence of large clusters of ca...

Methods for performing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in behaving and lesioned monkeys using a human MR scanner are reported. Materials for head implant surgery were selected based on tests for magnetic susceptibility. A primate chair with a rigid head fixation system and a mock scanner environment for training were developed....

A look back at work that established the link between eye and brain.

"Biological motion" may be defined by the pattern of movement of a small number of lights attached to the major joints of a human performing simple actions. Normal observers watching such displays immediately recognize a person and his or her actions. In the present study, we investigated the effects of lesions of anterior cortical regions on the p...

A reference work for the emerging field of multisensory integration, covering multidisciplinary research that goes beyond the traditional "sense-by-sense" approach and recognizes that perception is fundamentally a multisensory experience. This landmark reference work brings together for the first time in one volume the most recent research from dif...

After lesions of striate cortex in primates, there is still the capacity to detect and localize visual stimuli. In this chapter we review three aspects of our study of this phenomenon in macaques. First, we found that macaques that received their striate lesions as infants had considerably greater ability to detect and localize stimuli than those t...

Cortical area, MT (middle temporal area) is specialized for the visual analysis of stimulus motion in the brain. It has been suggested [Brain 118 (1995) 1375] that motion signals reach area MT via two dissociable routes, namely a 'direct' route which bypasses primary visual cortex (area, striate cortex (V1)) and is specialized for processing 'fast'...

Modern study of the neurophysiology of the cerebral cortex began with Fritsch and Hitzig's discovery that electrical stimulation of the cortex produces movements. The importance of this discovery was threefold: it was the first demonstration of cortex devoted to motor function, the first indication that the cortex was electrically excitable, and th...

this paper we are concerned only with uniform linear motion. For certain other kinds of motion (e.g. rotation or curvilinear motion, or motion in depth), analogous ambiguities exist and can be described and solved in a manner similar to the one we present here (but see also Hildreth, 1983)

A "grandmother cell" is a hypothetical neuron that responds only to a highly complex, specific, and meaningful stimulus, such as the image of one's grandmother. The term originated in a parable Jerry Lettvin told in 1967. A similar concept had been systematically developed a few years earlier by Jerzy Konorski who called such cells "gnostic" units....

Bartolomeo Panizza was the first person to produce experimental and clinical evidence for a visual area in the posterior cerebral cortex. We here provide the first translation of this work entitled "Observations on the optic nerve" originally published in Italian in 1855. We also review the state of knowledge of the brain around Panizza's time, sum...

Neurons in a restricted zone in the precentral gyrus of macaque monkeys respond to tactile, visual, and auditory stimuli. The tactile receptive fields of these multimodal cells are usually located on the face, arm, or upper torso. In the present study, in awake monkeys sitting in a primate chair, the neurons responded to a tactile probe touching th...

Can we learn without consciousness? When the eminent neuropsychologist, Lawrence Weiskrantz first coined the term 'blindsight' to describe a condition whereby a patient could demonstrate that they were aware of some object, yet insist that they were completely unaware of its existence, the response from some in the scientific community was one of e...

Previously we reported that new neurons are added to the hippocampus and neocortex of adult macaque monkeys. Here we compare the production and survival of adult-generated neurons and glia in the dentate gyrus, prefrontal cortex, and inferior temporal cortex. Twelve adult macaques were injected with the thymidine analogue BrdUrd, and the phenotypes...

this paper we are concerned only with uniform linear motion. For certain other kinds of motion (e.g. rotation or curvilinear motion, or motion in depth), analogous ambiguities exist and can be described and solved in a manner similar to the one we present here (but see also Hildreth, 1983)

Previous studies have established that humans and monkeys with damage to striate cortex are able to detect and localize bright targets within the resultant scotoma. Electrophysiological evidence in monkeys suggests that residual vision also might include sensitivity to direction of visual motion. We tested whether macaque monkeys with longstanding...

For over 100 years a central assumption in the field of neuroscience has been that new neurons are not added to the adult mammalian brain. This perspective examines the origins of this dogma, its perseverance in the face of contradictory evidence, and its final collapse. The acceptance of adult neurogenesis may be part of a contemporary paradigm sh...

Single-neuron recordings in the human hippocampus, entorhinal cortex and amygdala demonstrate that cells in these areas can respond selectively to particular categories of visual stimuli.

ically, eye movements do not occur with radial optic flow stimuli [see (11) for a full discussion and experimental evidence]. The optic flow display was widely separated from the single words, which were presented foveally for a brief duration, factors that would be further expected to minimize eye movements. Nevertheless, we elected to formally me...

In primates, prefrontal, inferior temporal, and posterior parietal cortex are important for cognitive function. It is shown that in adult macaques, new neurons are added to these three neocortical association areas, but not to a primary sensory area (striate cortex). The new neurons appeared to originate in the subventricular zone and to migrate th...

Hieronymus Bosch and other early Renaissance artists depicted 'stone operations' in which stones were supposedly surgically removed from the head as a treatment for mental illness. These works have usually been interpreted either as portraying a contemporary practice of medical charlatans or as an allegory of human folly, rather than a real event....

The oldest known surgical procedure is trephining or trepanning, the removal of a piece of bone from the skull. It was practiced starting in the late Paleolithic period and in virtually every part of the world. It is still used in both Western and non-Western medicine. The methods and motives of trephining in different times and cultures are review...

Dynamic representation of eye position in the parieto-occipital sulcus. Area V6A, on the anterior bank of the parieto-occipital sulcus of the monkey brain, contains neurons sensitive both to visual stimulation and to the position and movement of the eyes. We examined the effects of eye position and eye movement on the activity of V6A neurons in mon...

The production of new hippocampal neurons in adulthood has been well documented in rodents. Recent studies have extended these findings to other mammalian species, such as tree shrews and marmoset monkeys. However, hippocampal neurogenesis has not been demonstrated in adult Old World primates. To investigate this possibility, we injected 11 adult O...

Humans can accurately perceive the location of a sound source-not only the direction, but also the distance. Sounds near the head, within ducking or reaching distance, have a special saliency. However, little is known about this perception of auditory distance. The direction to a sound source can be determined by interaural differences, and the mec...

One of the earliest ideas about vision is that it depends on light that streams out of the eye and detects surrounding objects. This view was attacked in its own time and finally disproved more than 2000 years later. Yet the idea of a beam leaving the eye persisted in beliefs both about the evil eye and the power of a lover's gaze. It is still wide...

We tested whether the primate hippocampus was functionally heterogenous along its anterior-posterior axis. Two monkeys were trained on both a spatial and nonspatial memory task and the incidence of spatial and nonspatial delay activity in the anterior, middle, and posterior hippocampus was noted. Spatial delay activity (activity in the delay period...

Claude Bernard (1813-1878) was the founder of modern experimental physiology and one of the most famous French scientists of all time. Although he is particularly remem bered today for his concept of the constancy of the internal environment, this idea had no impact in his lifetime. This article considers his achievements and some possible reasons...

Rembrandt's striking painting of a human brain being dissected by a headless figure is actually a fragment of a larger work. The original was both a commissioned group portrait of a surgeons' guild and an account of a public dissection. Such dissections served both educational and entertainment functions in 17th century Holland.

The visual function that survives damage to the primary visual cortex (V1) in humans is often unaccompanied by awareness. This type of residual vision, called 'blindsight,' has raised considerable interest because it implies a separation of conscious from unconscious vision mechanisms. The monkey visual system has proven to be a useful model in elu...

Neurons in the ventral premotor cortex of the monkey encode the locations of visual, tactile, auditory and remembered stimuli. Some of these neurons encode the locations of stimuli with respect to the arm, and may be useful for guiding movements of the arm. Others encode the locations of stimuli with respect to the head, and may be useful for guidi...

Galen, who lived in the Roman Empire in the 2nd century, was the greatest experimental physiologist and anatomist of classical antiquity. His ideas about biology and medicine were dominant in Europe for more than 1500 years. In one of his most famous experi ments, he demonstrated loss of vocalization after section of the recurrent laryngeal nerves...

The ventral premotor cortex (PMv) of the macaque monkey contains neurons that respond both to visual and to tactile stimuli. For almost all of these "bimodal" cells, the visual receptive field is anchored to the tactile receptive field on the head or the arms, and remains stationary when the eyes fixate different locations. This study compared the...

Leonardo Da Vinci had a deep interest in the structure and function of the body. His drawings are the oldest surviving naturalistic depictions of human anatomy. This article examines seven of his drawings of the nervous system. In the earlier ones, he is almost totally bound by medieval tradition. Later, his drawings become more closely tied to his...

this paper we are concerned only with uniform linear motion. For certain other kinds of motion (e.g. rotation or curvilinear motion, or motion in depth), analogous ambiguities exist and can be described and solved in a manner similar to the one we present here (but see also Hildreth, 1983).

The ventral premotor cortex in primates is thought to be involved in sensory-motor integration. Many of its neurons respond to visual stimuli in the space near the arms or face. In this study on the ventral premotor cortex of monkeys, an object was presented within the visual receptive fields of individual neurons, then the lights were turned off a...

In macaque ventral premotor cortex, we recorded the activity of neurons that responded to both visual and tactile stimuli. For these bimodal cells, the visual receptive field extended from the tactile receptive field into the adjacent space. Their tactile receptive fields were organized topographically, with the arms represented medially, the face...

We previously found [42] that lesions of the superior temporal polysensory area (STP) cause temporary deficits in the production of eye movements. In order to both define regions participating in the ensuing recovery and to further explore the cortical control of eye movements, we examined the effects of addition of frontal eye field (FEF) lesions...

Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772) was a famous Swedish religious thinker and mystic He also wrote extensively on brain function Many of his writings on the brain remained unpublished for 100 years or more, none had any effect on the development of neuro science Yet they contain many extraordinary insights that did not recur until late in the 19th cent...

1. Monkeys with large unilateral surgical ablations of striate cortex, sustained either in adulthood or at 5-6 wk of age, were trained on an oculomotor detection and localization task and tested with visual stimuli in the hemifields ipsilateral and contralateral to the lesion 2-5 yr after surgery. 2. Monkeys with lesions sustained in adulthood were...

This chapter traces the origins of our current ideas about visual cortex. We begin, in Section 2, long before the beginning of science, in the 30th century BCE, with the earliest description of the cerebral cortex. In Section 3 we consider the views of Greek philosopher-scientists on the functions of the brain. Section 4 concerns the long period in...

We raise three issues concerning the Eichenbaum, Otto & Cohen (1994) model. (1) We argue against the strict division of labor that Eichenbaum et al. attribute to neocortical and limbic regions. (2) We raise the possibility that the anterior and posterior portions of the hippocampus may be important for different types of information processing. (3)...

Three monkeys with extensive preoperative training on visual and auditory memory tasks (delayed matching-to-sample), an auditory pattern-discrimination task, and a visual serial-order task, received bilateral lesions of the superior temporal (ST) cortex in two stages, with testing after each lesion. Unilateral ST cortex lesions resulted in only mod...

The contributions to this volume, the sixteenth in the prestigious Attention and Performance series, revisit the issue of modularity, the idea that many functions are independently realized in specialized, autonomous modules. Although there is much evidence of modularity in the brain, there is also reason to believe that the outcome of processing,...

Blindsight is a phenomenon in which human patients with damage to striate cortex deny any visual sensation in the resultant visual field defect but can nonetheless detect and localize stimuli when persuaded to guess. Although monkeys with striate lesions have also been shown to exhibit some residual vision, it is not yet clear to what extent the re...

Aristotle argued that the heart was the center of sensation and movement. By contrast, his predecessors, such as Alcmaeon, and his contemporaries, such as the Hippocratic doctors, attributed these functions to the brain. This article examines Aristotle's views on brain function in the context of his time and considers their subsequent influence on...

1. On the basis of its anatomic connections and single-unit properties, the superior temporal polysensory area (STP) would seem to be primarily involved in visuospatial functions. We have examined the effects of lesions of STP on saccadic eye movements, visual fixation, and smooth pursuit eye movements to directly test the hypothesis that STP is in...