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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Architectonics of the Human Telencephalic Cortex

Architectonics of the Human Telencephalic Cortex

Braak, H.

Paperback

Series: Studies of Brain Function, Book 4

Medical ReferenceAnthropology

ISBN10: 3642815243
ISBN13: 9783642815249
Publisher: Springer
Published: Dec 16 2011
Pages: 147
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.35 Width: 6.69 Depth: 9.61
Language: English
This is a timely opus. Most of us now are too young to remember the unpleasant ring of a polemic between those who produced hair-splitting parcellations of the cortex (to paraphrase one of O. Vogt's favourite expressions) and those who saw the cortex as a homogeneous matrix sus- taining the reverberations of EEG waves (to paraphrase Bailey and von Bonin). One camp accused the other of producing bogus preparations with a paint brush, and the other way around the accusation was that of poor eye-sight. Artefacts of various sorts were invoked to explain the opponent's error, ranging from perceptual effects (Mach bands crispening the areal borders) to poor fixation supposedly due to perfusion too soon (!) after death. I have heard most of this directly from the protagonists' mouths. The polemic was not resolved but it has mellowed with age and ultimately faded out. I was relieved to see that Professor Braak elegantly avoids dis- cussion of an extrememist tenet, that of hair-sharp areal boundaries, which makes little sense in developmental biology and is irrelevant to neurophysiology. It was actually detrimental to cortical neuroanatomy, since its negation led to the idea that structurally distinct areas are not at all existent. Yet, nobody would deny the reality of five fingers on one hand even if the detailed assignment of every epidermal cell to one finger or another is obviously impossible.

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