Читать книгу The Form Within - Karl H Pribram - Страница 17

My approach to mapmaking was different. I was trying to pin down what part of the temporal lobes that Paul Bucy (with whom I took my first residency in neurosurgery) had removed was responsible for the monkeys’ failure to make choices among simple visual stimuli. I realized that in order to do the temporal lobe surgery effectively, my maps must specify what it is that is being mapped—such as the connections from the thalamus, the halfway house of sensory input to our brain’s cortex. Otherwise, the results of my surgery would continue to be the same hodgepodge of “localization” as that based upon brain damage in humans, which was then still in vogue.

A map of the major highways of the United States looks considerably different from one of the identical terrain that shows where mineral resources are located. Likewise, the results of damaging a part of the brain cortex would differ if one had disrupted a part of the “railroad” (the connections within the brain) versus the “mineral resources” (the sensory input to the brain).

In reporting the results of my research I therefore began by presenting a series of brain maps. I did not have the resources or the money to prepare slides, so I drew the maps with colored crayons on window shades. (The maps shown here are more sophisticated than the ones I actually drew. Unfortunately, those early maps disintegrated after several decades, and I have not been able to find photographs of them.) One window shade presented what we knew of the endings in the cortex of the sensory input through the thalamus. Another window shade presented the fine architecture of the arrangement of cells in layers of the cortex. Still another noted the results of brain electrical stimulation. Finally, after the initial experiments were completed, I was able to show the effects of experimental surgical removals of cortex on specific behavioral tests.

2. Cytoarchitectural map

3. Mapping regions of the brain according to the effects of experimental surgical removals on visual choices

4. Map of the functions of the cortex derived from clinical studies

5. Map of the anatomical output from the cortex

6. Map of the input to the cortex from the thalamus