vinces99 writes A couple of years ago a scientist looking at dozens of MRI scans of human brains noticed something surprising: A large fiber pathway that seemed to be part of the network of connections that process visual information that wasn’t mentioned in any modern-day anatomy textbooks. “It was this massive bundle of fibers, visible in every brain I examined, ” said Jason Yeatman, a research scientist at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. “… As far as I could tell, it was absent from the literature and from all major neuroanatomy textbooks.'”With colleagues at Stanford University, Yeatman started some detective work to figure out the identity of that mysterious fiber bundle. The researchers found an early 20th century atlas that depicted the structure, now known as the vertical occipital fasciculus. But the last time that atlas had been checked out was 1912, meaning the researchers were the first to view the images in the last century. They describes the history and controversy of the elusive pathway in a paper published Nov. 17 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. You’d think that we’d have found all the parts of the human body by now, but not necessarily. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Major Brain Pathway Rediscovered After Century-old Confusion, Controversy