Barrels in the Desert: The Sde Boker Workshop on Neocortical Circuits

review of the meeting according to the major themes that emerged from the presentations and discussions, Is There a Uniform Design to the Neocortex? The opening presentation (T. Woolsey, Washington University) underscored two basic themes of the meeting: (1) that commonalties among cortical circuits even in One of great mysteries in biology is the function of the cerebral cortex. The neocortex constitutes the largest different species are, at this stage of our understanding, more compelling than their differences and (2) that the part of the brain in mammals and is essential for complex mental functions such as perception, motor planning, rodent barrel cortex provides a particularly advantageous model system for elucidating the operations of memory, imagination, language, attention, and awareness. The anatomical organization of the cerebral cortex cortical circuits. As early as the 1920s, long before the advent of transgenic mice, Lorente de Nó chose to base has apparently not changed significantly since its evolutionary appearance approximately 300 million years ago his comprehensive study of the cortical circuitry in an area of the mouse neocortex thought to be auditory (Allman, 1990). Its cellular components and basic circuitry develop in a stereotyped fashion (Miller, 1988; cortex, which is now appreciated to be the face region of the somatosensory cortex (Lorente de Nó , 1922). Ana-Rakic, 1988) that is conserved across different parts of the cortex and different mammalian species. Results tomically, barrels are well-defined structures (100–300 ␮m in diameter in mice and 150–600 ␮m diameter in rats) from seminal physiological studies (Hubel and Wiesel, 1977; Mountcastle, 1982), suggesting that the cortex is and contain relatively few neurons (in mice, ‫0052–0051ف‬ neurons per large barrel). Equally important, each barrel composed of functional modules, led to the idea that the neocortex may be comprised of many copies of a is associated with an identified sensory organ, a mysta-cial vibrissa, that can be manipulated in developmental basic circuit having similar functional characteristics. According to this view, the computation performed by and sensory physiology experiments. Thus, not only is a detailed description of barrel cortex microcircuitry in cortical circuits in different cortical regions would be the same, and the apparent functional differences among principle feasible, but the receptive field properties of its neurons can be increasingly understood on the basis areas would be due to their different inputs (Hubel and Wiesel, 1974). In spite of substantial progress in the of interconnections within and among the …