video: This shows pathways in the forebrain of the owl monkey organized as broad coherent grids of crossing pathways. The owl monkey, a small new-world monkey whose brain is very smooth compared with the human brain, with only one or two major folds. Here, we can see that the grid structures of the different regions inherit the basic orientations of the body plan, being predominantly front-to-back or left-to-right, and also fit together coherently as a single extremely modified grid. After one turn, paths in one frontal region are removed to show the paths, yellow and purple, of the deep crevice between the frontal and temporal lobes, or Sylvian fissure. This video relates to a paper that appeared in the March 30, 2012, issue of Science, published by AAAS. The paper, by V.J. Wedeen at Massachusetts General Hospital in Charlestown, MA, and colleagues was titled, "The Geometric Structure of the Brain Fiber Pathways." view more
Credit: Video courtesy of Van Wedeen, MGH Radiology, Harvard Medical School