You will understand the figure immediately after reading the caption of figure 2 of Zeng, Weidner et al. (2023); the pathways cover declarative/procedural memory consolidation (hippocampus), objects (orbital and temporal cortices), language (Wernicke's and Broca's areas), movement execution (FEF/M1/S1), and finally a pathway linking the two hemispheres to unify consciousness. Recall that patients with colossal section can experience impressions from the other hemisphere by way of unconscious pathways via the pontine nuclei (De Haan, Lamme et al. 2020; Tehovnik, Hasanbegović, Chen 2024; Tehovnik, Patel, Tolias et al. 2021). Missing from figure 2 are all the afferents from the senses, but I am sure you can fill this in (in your mind) for vision, audition, somato-sensation/vestibular, gustation, and olfaction. We suspect that every vertebrate has a homologous set of pathways from fishes to humans that operate in a similar fashion (why reinvent the wheel when the original design of 500 million years ago worked so well), and that signals of these pathway are duplicated as executable code (i.e., efference copy) in the cerebellum, and every vertebrate has a cerebellum, a structure that evolved in tandem with the neocortex (i.e., a conclusion based on the 4 to 1 ratio of cell number between the cerebellum and neocortex for mammals, Herculano-Houzel 2010).
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Methodology
- Research Methodology
- Research Papers