Giuseppe Moruzzi’s midpontine pretrigeminal preparation and its continuing importance for neuroscience

The description of the midpontine pretrigeminal preparation in the cat by Giuseppe Moruzzi and his associates Cesira Batini, Mario Palestini, Gianfranco Rossi and Alberto Zanchetti goes back to more than fifty years ago (Batini et al., 1959). I have always thought that their work proved no less important for neuroscience than Moruzzi and Magoun’s celebrated discovery of the arousing function of the brainstem reticular formation (Moruzzi and Magoun, 1949). It is important for neurophysiology because it has pointed unambiguously to an active induction of sleep by caudal brainstem structures, thus suggesting a possible mechanism of insomnia, but it is especially important for clinical neurology because it showed that an almost completely de-afferented and de-efferented brain could sustain a state of conscious awareness, as occurs in the so-called locked-in syndrome in humans. And yet, unlike the Moruzzi-Magoun paper (1949) which continues to be amply cited in the neurological literature, the article by Batini et al. (1959) has largely disappeared from the references of the latest editions of popular textbooks of basic neuroscience (e.g. Kandel et al., 2000), as well as of clinical treatises dealing with the neurology of consciousness and its disorders (e.g. Posner et al., 2007; Laureys and Tononi, 2009). As of December 2010, Google Scholar shows 2142 total citations for Moruzzi and Magoun (1949), with 51 citations in Giuseppe Moruzzi’s midpontine pretrigeminal preparation and its continuing importance for neuroscience