Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

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Vernon Mountcastle
Born
Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

(1918-07-15)July 15, 1918
DiedJanuary 11, 2015(2015-01-11) (aged 96)
EducationRoanoke College
SpouseNancy Clayton
Awards
Scientific career
InstitutionsJohns Hopkins University

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was an American

somatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

Early life and education

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was born on July 15, 1918, in Shelbyville, Kentucky as the third of five children into a family of "farmers, industrial entrepreneurs, or builders of railroads".[8] In 1921 his family moved to Roanoke, Virginia where he went to elementary and junior high school and was "an enthusiastic Boy Scout".[8] Because his mother, a former teacher, had taught him to read and write when he was 4 years old, he immediately moved ahead two grades when entering the public school system and graduated from high school at the age of 16. He entered

Sigma Chi Fraternity.[9]
In 1938 he started
Warfield Longcope. During his studies, Mountcastle planned to become a surgeon and never performed any experiments until after he returned from World War II.[8] He joined the V-12 Navy College Training Program for medical students in January 1942, which allowed him to finish medical school and internship and was eventually ordered to report to the Naval Operating Base in Norfolk, Virginia in June 1943. Throughout the fall of 1943 and most of 1944 he was stationed in Africa and Europe and served on four LSTs during the Anzio and Normandy invasions.[8]
As he had received insufficient points for discharge from the Navy by the end of the war, he had to serve for one more year, which he spent at the
USS Cadmus. He received his discharge from the Navy just before the Cadmus left for extended ocean duty.[8]

Research and career

Mountcastle's interest in cognition, specifically perception, led him to guide his laboratory to studies that linked perception and neural responses in the 1960s. Although there were several notable works from his laboratory, the highest profile early paper appeared in 1968,[10] a study explaining the neural basis of Flutter and vibration by the action of peripheral mechanoreceptors.[11][12]

In 1978 Mountcastle proposed that all parts of the neocortex operate through a common principle, with the cortical column being the unit of computation.[4]

Mountcastle's devotion to studies of single unit neural coding evolved through his leadership in the Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, which for many years, was the only institute in the world devoted to this sub-field. Its work is continued today in the Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute. Mountcastle died in Baltimore at the age of 96 in January 2015.[13]

Awards and honours

Mountcastle was elected to the

National Academy of Sciences.[19]

David Hubel in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said Mountcastle's "discovery of columns in the somatosensory cortex was surely the single most important contribution to the understanding of cerebral cortex since Ramón y Cajal".[20]

rosetta stone of neuroscience".[21]

References

  1. PMID 13439410
    .
  2. S2CID 205437385
    .
  3. PMID 25693556
    .
  4. ^
    ISBN 0-262-05020-X
  5. ISBN 978-0-674-01974-4
    .
  6. ^ "Mountcaslte: the Brain Voyager". Archived from the original on 2017-03-09. Retrieved 2007-03-05.
  7. S2CID 2128539
    .
  8. ^
    ISBN 978-0-19-538010-1
    .
  9. ^ "Dr. Vernon B. Mountcastle, Jr. '38". Retrieved 6 July 2020.
  10. PMID 4972033
    .
  11. ^ Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database. (subscription required)
  12. Microsoft Academic
  13. Washington Post
  14. ^ "Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2022-07-20.
  15. ^ "Vernon B. Mountcastle". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2022-07-20.
  16. ^ "APS Member History". search.amphilsoc.org. Retrieved 2022-07-20.
  17. ^ "About Us". World Cultural Council. Retrieved November 8, 2016.
  18. American Academy of Achievement
    .
  19. ^ "Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on August 1, 2012. Retrieved 16 February 2011.
  20. ^ Hubel, David H. "Nobel lecture" (PDF). Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 16 February 2011.
  21. ^ On Intelligence, 2004, Jeff Hawkins, page 52
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