A Scientific Mystery: A Region of the Brain Identified, Fought Over and Rediscovered

Meynert strongly believed that all of the brain's association pathways ran from front to back — horizontally. But the pathway in question, which Wernicke had called the vertical occipital fasciculus, or VOF, ran vertically. Although Yeatman and Weiner found references to the VOF under a variety of different names in texts published for about 30 years after Wernicke's original discovery, Meynert never accepted the VOF and references to it became contentious before eventually disappearing entirely from the literature.

Although the VOF disappeared, Wernicke's publication of its discovery still existed in Lane Medical Library, where Yeatman and Weiner eventually tracked it down.

"That was a really cool experience that most people don't have any more, when you have to check your belongings at the door because the book you are about to look at is worth thousands of dollars per page," Weiner said. "You are literally smelling 100-year-old ink as you find the images you have been searching for."

Carl Wernicke, Mschr Psychiat Neurol, circa 1900. Photographer, Max Glauer

Yeatman said the journey gave him an education in early neuroscience research. "There are a lot of gems in the literature that have been forgotten over the years," he said. "This project made me appreciate the detail and precision of these classic pieces of work."

Both Yeatman and Wandell said this work also highlights the value of modern techniques for reproducing results. No longer can a field simply disregard findings that don't fit a prevailing idea. "Now we can record our methodologies and software algorithms to be distributed with our papers, allowing any researcher in the world to reproduce our results," Yeatman said.

"The library material was hard to find and required someone with passion for the effort," said Wandell, who is the Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor. "Modern tools should help with sharing, transparency and reproducibility of research, and hopefully what we relearned won't be forgotten."

The idea of sharing data to speed scientific progress is a cause Wandell has championed at the Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging, which he directs, and that he has been promoting in his work helping the Stanford Neurosciences Institute plan the computing strategy for its new facility.

With shared data and labs worldwide attempting to reproduce published results, the teams said it is less likely that modern neuroscience findings today will be lost due to differences of opinion over a discovery's relevance.

The brain imaging that resulted in the rediscovery of the earlier work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. Additional authors include research associate Franco Pestilli and postdoctoral scholars Ariel Rokem and Aviv Mezer.

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A Scientific Mystery: A Region of the Brain Identified, Fought Over and Rediscovered

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