American physician
Vernon Mountcastle
Born Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle
(1918-07-15 ) July 15, 1918Died January 11, 2015(2015-01-11) (aged 96) Education Roanoke College Spouse Nancy Clayton Awards Scientific career Institutions Johns Hopkins University
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was an American neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University . He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper,[ 1] somatosensory cortex , used columnar organization as their basis.[ 2] [ 3] [ 4] [ 5] [ 6] [ 7]
^ Mountcastle, V. B. (1957). "Modality and topographic properties of single neurons of cat's somatic sensory cortex" . Journal of Neurophysiology . 20 (4): 408–34. doi :10.1152/jn.1957.20.4.408 PMID 13439410 . ^ Snyder, S. H. (2015). "Vernon B. Mountcastle 1918-2015" . Nature Neuroscience . 18 (3): 318. doi :10.1038/nn.3958 PMID 25686477 . S2CID 205437385 . ^ Martin, Kevan (2015). "Vernon B. Mountcastle (1918–2015) Discoverer of the repeating organization of neurons in the mammalian cortex" . Nature . 518 (7539): 304. doi :10.1038/518304a PMID 25693556 . ^ Cite error: The named reference M-1978 was invoked but never defined (see the help page ). ^ Vernon Mountcastle (2005), The sensory hand: neural mechanisms of somatic sensation , Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-01974-4 .
^ "Mountcaslte: the Brain Voyager" . Archived from the original on 2017-03-09. Retrieved 2007-03-05 .^ Mountcastle, V. B.; Lynch, J. C.; Georgopoulos, A; Sakata, H; Acuna, C (1975). "Posterior parietal association cortex of the monkey: Command functions for operations within extrapersonal space". Journal of Neurophysiology . 38 (4): 871–908. doi :10.1152/jn.1975.38.4.871 . PMID 808592 . S2CID 2128539 .