Cortical maps and modern phrenology

Abstract

Cortical cytoarchitectonics has had a chequered history. Beginning with Meynert's discovery of the systematic layering of neurons in the cerebral cortex and with Betz's discovery of the giant cells that bear his name, and initially influenced by phrenological ideas, over the years it has gone in and out of favour as conceptual fashions and methods of investigation have changed. Currently, it seems to be enjoying resurgent popularity as modern phrenologists, equipped with the powerful tools of functional MRI, seek to relate tiny pseudo-coloured patches of slightly enhanced cortical activity associated with some limited cognitive function to an underlying structural correlate. The reappearance, therefore, of what was once a classical atlas of human cortical architectonics can be seen as a landmark, especially when accompanied by an insightful survey of the history of the field and its relevance to efforts at localizing function in the human cortex using modern imaging techniques. Die Cytoarchitektonik der Hirnrinde des erwachsenen Menschen. Atlas mit 112 mikrophotografischen Tafeln in besonderer Mappe , with an accompanying 810 page text volume, which itself contained 162 figures, was written by von Economo and Koskinas, and published in 100 sets by Julius Springer in Vienna in 1925. The atlas was a remarkable piece of work. Every volume consisted of 112 original photographs made as contact prints from large, 40 cm × 40 cm glass negatives taken at a magnification of 100 times from histological sections of the human cortex stained by the Nissl method (Fig. 1). The photographs were unbound and housed in a boxlike case that opened as a book, with an enclosed slip that warned one not to crack them by lifting with one hand and to keep one's sticky fingers off the surface of the plate. In the present volume, the plates have been reproduced at exactly the …