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Neurobiology

Columns, slabs and pinwheels

Nature volume 395, pages 20–21 (1998)Cite this article

For over 30 years neurobiologists have been intrigued by how the outer layer of the brain — the cerebral cortex — is organized into columns of cells. These develop mainly after birth, under the control of activity driven by the sensory input. There are many models for this development, and, on page 73 of this issue, Wolf and Geisel1 argue that they are all subject to symmetry principles. These principles lead to some general conclusions about the ways in which the columns develop, independent of when and how development occurs.

The columnar organization of the cerebral cortex was first demonstrated by Mountcastle2 in the somatosensory cortex, then elaborated by Hubel and Wiesel3 in the visual cortex. They discovered that cells in a column, extending from the surface of the cortex to the white matter directly underneath, have similar properties. Working with cat visual cortex, Hubel and Wiesel showed that two properties are organized in a columnar fashion — ocular dominance (response to the right or left eyes, or both) and orientation selectivity (selection for the orientation of a bar; horizontal, vertical or some angle in-between). Because almost every cell has these two properties, there are two overlapping columnar maps. When the macaque visual cortex was investigated, a third property was included — colour. This inserted into the ocular-dominance and orientation-selectivity maps, with a pattern of blobs recognizable in cytochrome-oxidase stains centred on the ocular dominance columns.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. the Department of Ophthalmology and Visual Science, Yale University School of Medicine, 330 Cedar Street, New Haven, 06520-8061, Connecticut, USA

    Nigel W. Daw

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  1. Nigel W. Daw
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Daw, N. Columns, slabs and pinwheels. Nature 395, 20–21 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/25610

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