Vernon Mountcastle
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Vernon Mountcastle is a retired neuroscientist from 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, nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper on the somatosensory cortex used columnar organization as their basis. Mountcastle's interest in cognition, specifically perception, led him to guide his lab to studies that linked perception and neural responses in the 1960s. Although there were several works from his lab, the highest profile early paper was in 1968 (Talbot et al), a study explaining the neural basis of flutter and vibration by the action of peripheral mechanoreceptors. Mountcastle's devotion to studies of single unit neural coding evolved through his leadership in the Bard Labs of Neurophysiology at Johns Hopkins, which was for many years the only institute in the world devoted to this sub-field, and its work is continued today in the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute.
Vernon Mountcastle is a graduate of Roanoke College in Virginia.
[edit] Bibliography
- Vernon Mountcastle (1978), "An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Model and the Distributed System", The Mindful Brain (Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle, eds.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
