Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle ( born July 15, 1918 in Shelbyville, Kentucky) is an American neuroscientist.

Mountcastle was 1964-1980 successor of Philip Bard as Director of the Department of Physiology at the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. Here he founded the Philip Bard Laboratories of Neurophysiology, the part of the Department of Neuroscience were. From 1970 to 1971 he was president of the Society for Neuroscience.

In a work of 1957 on the organization of somatosensory areas of the brain of cats, he proved the structure of the cortex in this area in columnar arranged neurons, which have about 500 micrometers expansion. Neurons within this region have a common reception area.

In 1966 he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1978 he was awarded the Louisa Gross Horwitz Prize, the 1980 Ralph W. Gerard Prize in 1983 with the Albert Lasker Award for Basic Medical Research, 1986 with the United States National Medal of Science and in 1998 with the NAS Award in the Neurosciences excellent.

Publications

• Mountcastle, V. (1978 ): An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Model and the Distributed System. In: Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group - Selective Theory of Higher Brain Function (Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle, eds. ). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.