Comparative Neuroanatomy

Catalog description

This course elucidates the structural organization of the nervous system and describes the evolutionary principles that guide brain development. NEURO 512 Comparative Neuroanatomy (4) This course provides instruction on the functional and structural organization of the vertebrate central nervous system. In addition to lectures, students attend laboratory sessions devoted to human brain dissections, histologic sections of various vertebrate brains, and non-invasive magnetic resonance images.Following instruction on the structural and physiological properties of neurons, students learn how structural and neurochemical variations endow neurons with specific computational properties so that connections between different neuronal subtypes enable local circuits to extract information and create specific input-output transformations that define the functional character of each neural system. The structural organization of the brain is then described both grossly and at the level of functional circuits.Material at the gross level describes the 3-D spatial relationships among the nuclei and fiber tracts within each subdivision of the central nervous system so that students can describe the internal organization of the forebrain, midbrain, hindbrain, and spinal cord. As part of this, students learn to recognize specific structures in different planes of sections along the major axes of the brain.Material at the functional level describes the sensory, motor, and limbic systems according to their circuit connections. Emphasis is placed on the specific connections that enable circuits to transform specific types of information. Students are expected to describe the successive series of nuclei and interconnected pathways that comprise each major neural system.Students are also taught to view neuroanatomy as a scientific field of inquiry. Landmark discoveries and the methods by which prominent neuroanatomists made those discoveries provide a context for describing brain organization. Breakthrough scientific experiments are discussed to illustrate how the structural-functional relationships of the brain have been elucidated. Attention is also devoted to instructing students in modern experimental methods that are used to determine how brain circuits are altered by experimental manipulations.While the course emphasizes the mammalian nervous system, many aspects of brain organization in non-mammalian vertebrates are presented. In the last third of the course, students read a monograph focused on the principles that guided vertebrate brain evolution across different phylogenetic lineages. A series of lectures are devoted to neurocladistics and the evidence that has prompted competing theories of brain evolution so that students can critically evaluate differences in brain organization across different groups of vertebrates.