Abstract
In 1957 Mountcastle introduced the concept of the cortical column as the vertical processing unit of the cerebral cortex. This idea, the “columnar hypothesis,” was based on the then prevailing view that the cortex is most richly interconnected in its vertical dimension (Lorente de No 1949) and on Mountcastle’s demonstration in single-unit recording experiments in cat (and later monkey; Powell and Mountcastle 1959) primary somatosensory cortex (SI) that neurons in ~0.5 mm wide vertical columns are activated by peripheral stimuli of the same submodality and have similar receptive fields (RFs). Mountcastle (1957) and Powell and Mountcastle (1959) also showed that their cortical columns – later named “macrocolumns” to distinguish them from single-cell-wide “minicolumns” (Mountcastle 1978) – can be separated from each other by abrupt boundaries, on the opposite sides of which neurons respond to stimuli of different submodalities and/or have prominently different RFs.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Albus K (1975) A quantitative study of the projection area of the central and the paracentral visual field in area 17 of the cat: I. The precision of the topography. Exp Brain Res 24:159–179
Beaulieu C, Colonnier M (1989) Number of neurons in individual laminae of areas 3b, 4γ, and 6aα of the cat cerebral cortex: a comparison with major visual areas. J Comp Neurol 279:228–234
Blasdel GG, Salama G (1986) Voltage-sensitive dyes reveal a modular organization in monkey striate cortex. Nature 321:579–585
Bosking WH, Crowley JC, Fitzpatrick D (2002) Spatial coding of position and orientation in primary visual cortex. Nat Neurosci 5:874–882
Buzas P, Volgushev M, Eysel UT, Kisvarday ZF (2003) Independence of visuotopic representation and orientation map in the visual cortex of the cat. Eur J Neurosci 18:957–968
Da Costa NM, Martin KAC (2010) Whose cortical column would that be? Front Neuroanat 4:16
Das A, Gilbert CD (1997) Distortions of visuotopic map match orientation singularities in primary visual cortex. Nature 387:594–598
Favorov OV (1991) Detection and characterization of the mosaic body representation in SI cortex. In: Franzen O, Westman J (eds) Information processing in the somatosensory system. Macmillan Press, London, pp 224–232
Favorov OV, Diamond M (1990) Demonstration of discrete place-defined columns, segregates, in cat SI. J Comp Neurol 298:97–112
Favorov OV, Kursun O (2011) Neocortical layer 4 as a pluripotent function linearizer. J Neurophysiol 105:1342–1360
Favorov O, Whitsel BL (1988a) Spatial organization of the peripheral input to area 1 cell columns: I. The detection of “segregates”. Brain Res Rev 13:25–42
Favorov O, Whitsel BL (1988b) Spatial organization of the peripheral input to area 1 cell columns: II. The forelimb representation achieved by a mosaic of segregates. Brain Res Rev 13:43–56
Favorov OV, Diamond ME, Whitsel BL (1987) Evidence for a mosaic representation of the body surface in area 3b of the somatic cortex of cat. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 84:6606–6610
Feldman ML (1984) Morphology of the neocortical pyramidal neuron. In: Peters A, Jones EG (eds) Cerebral Cortex. Vol. 1. Plenum, New York, pp 123–200
Garraghty PE, Sur M (1990) Morphology of single intracellularly stained axons terminating in area 3b of macaque monkeys. J Comp Neurol 294:583–593
Horton CH, Adams DL (2005) The cortical column: a structure without a function. Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 360:837–862
Hubel DH, Wiesel TN (1974) Uniformity of monkey striate cortex: a parallel relationship between field size, scatter, and magnification factor. J Comp Neurol 158:295–305
Landry P, Deschenes M (1981) Intracortical arborizations and receptive fields of identified ventrobasal thalamocortical afferents to the primary somatic sensory cortex in the cat. J Comp Neurol 199:345–371
Landry P, Diadori P, Leclerc S, Dykes RW (1987) Morphological and electrophysiological characteristics of somatosensory thalamocortical axons studied with intra-axonal staining and recording in the cat. Exp Brain Res 65:317–330
Lorente de No R (1949) Cerebral cortex: architecture, intracortical connections, motor projections. In: Fulton JF (ed) Physiology of the nervous system, 3rd edn. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 288–312
Mountcastle VB (1957) Modality and topographic properties of single neurons of cat’s somatic sensory cortex. J Neurophysiol 20:374–434
Mountcastle VB (1978) An organizing principle for cerebral function: the unit module of the distributed system. In: Mountcastle VB, Edelman GM (eds) The mindful brain. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp 7–50
Poggio T, Bizzi E (2004) Generalization in vision and motor control. Nature 431:768–774
Powell TPS, Mountcastle VB (1959) Some aspects of the functional organization of the cortex of the postcentral gyrus of the monkey: a correlation of findings obtained in a single unit analysis with cytoarchitecture. Bull Johns Hopkins Hosp 105:133–162
Purves D, Riddle DR, La Mantia A-S (1992) Iterated patterns of brain circuitry (or how the cortex gets its spots). Trends Neurosci 15:362–368
Raussel E, Jones EG (1995) Extent of intracortical arborization of thalamocortical axons as a determinant of representational plasticity in monkey somatic sensory cortex. J Neurosci 15:4270–4288
Roe AW, Ts’o DY (1995) Visual topography in primate V2: multiple representation across functional stripes. J Neurosci 15:3689–3715
Swindale NV (1990) Is the cerebral cortex modular? Trends Neurosci 13:487–492
Tommerdahl M, Favorov OV, Whitsel BL, Nakhle B, Gonchar YA (1993) Minicolumnar activation patterns in cat and monkey SI cortex. Cereb Cortex 3:399–411
Yu H, Farley BJ, Jin DZ, Sur M (2005) The coordinated mapping of visual space and response features in visual cortex. Neuron 47:267–280
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Favorov, O.V., Whitsel, B.L., Tommerdahl, M. (2015). Discrete, Place-Defined Macrocolumns in Somatosensory Cortex: Lessons for Modular Organization of the Cerebral Cortex. In: Casanova, M., Opris, I. (eds) Recent Advances on the Modular Organization of the Cortex. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9900-3_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9900-3_9
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-9899-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-9900-3
eBook Packages: Biomedical and Life SciencesBiomedical and Life Sciences (R0)