Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

Vernon Mountcastle
Born	Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle July 15, 1918
Died	January 14, 2015 (aged 96)
Institutions	Johns Hopkins University
Alma mater	Roanoke College
Notable awards	Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize (1978) National Medal of Science (1986)
Spouse	Nancy Clayton

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex, as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper,^[1] on the somatosensory cortex, used columnar organization as their basis.^{[2][3][4][5][6][7][8]}

Education and early life

Mountcastle was born in Shelbyville, Kentucky. He was a graduate of Roanoke College in Virginia, where he was a member of the Sigma Chi Fraternity.^[9]

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.^[13]

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.^[14]

Awards and honours

Mountcastle was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1966. In 1978, he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize from Columbia University together with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, both of whom received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1981. In 1983, he was awarded the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research. He also received the United States National Medal of Science in 1986. In 1998 Mountcastle was awarded the NAS Award in the Neurosciences from the National Academy of Sciences.^[15]

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."^[16]

Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence describes Mountcastle's 1978 article, An organizing principle..., as "the rosetta stone of neuroscience".^[17]

References

1. Mountcastle, V. B. (1957). "Modality and topographic properties of single neurons of cat's somatic sensory cortex". Journal of Neurophysiology 20 (4): 408–34. PMID 13439410.
2. Snyder, S. H. (2015). "Vernon B. Mountcastle 1918-2015". Nature Neuroscience 18: 318. doi:10.1038/nn.3958. PMID 25686477.
3. Martin, Kevan (2015). "Vernon B. Mountcastle (1918–2015) Discoverer of the repeating organization of neurons in the mammalian cortex". Nature 518 (7539): 304. doi:10.1038/518304a. PMID 25693556.
4. Vernon Mountcastle (1978), "An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Model and the Distributed System", The Mindful Brain (Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle, eds.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
5. Vernon Mountcastle (1998), Perceptual neuroscience: the cerebral cortex, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-66188-2.
6. Vernon Mountcastle (2005), The sensory hand: neural mechanisms of somatic sensation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-01974-4.
7. Mountcaslte: the Brain Voyager
8. Mountcastle, V. B.; Lynch, J. C.; Georgopoulos, A; Sakata, H; Acuna, C (1975). "Posterior parietal association cortex of the monkey: Command functions for operations within extrapersonal space". Journal of Neurophysiology 38 (4): 871–908. PMID 808592.
9. Significant Sigs: Vernon Mountcastle
10. Talbot, W. H.; Darian-Smith, I; Kornhuber, H. H.; Mountcastle, V. B. (1968). "The sense of flutter-vibration: Comparison of the human capacity with response patterns of mechanoreceptive afferents from the monkey hand". Journal of Neurophysiology 31 (2): 301–34. PMID 4972033.
11. Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
12. List of publications from Microsoft Academic Search
13. Mountcastle, V. B. (1978), "An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Model and the Distributed System", in Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle, The Mindful Brain, MIT Press
14. Vernon Mountcastle, neuroscientist dubbed ‘the Jacques Cousteau of the cortex,’ dies, Washington Post
15. "Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal". National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 16 February 2011.
16. Hubel, David H. "Nobel lecture" (PDF). Nobelprize.org. Retrieved 16 February 2011.
17. On Intelligence, 2004, Jeff Hawkins, page 52