Revisiting a historic human brain with magnetic resonance imaging - the first description of a divided central sulcus (original) (raw)

Frontiers in neuroanatomy, 2014

Abstract

In 1860 and 1862, the German physiologist Wagner published two studies, in which he compared the cortical surfaces of brain specimens. This provided the first account of a rare anatomical variation - bridges across the central sulci in both hemispheres connecting the forward and backward facing central convolutions in one of the brains. The serendipitous rediscovery of the preserved historic brain specimen in the collections at Göttingen University, being mistaken as the brain of the mathematician C.F. Gauss, allowed us to further investigate the morphology of the bridges Wagner had described with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). On the historic lithograph, current photographs and MRI surface reconstructions of the brain, a connection across the central sulcus can only be seen in the left hemisphere. In the right hemisphere, contrary to the description of Wagner, a connecting structure is only present across the post-central sulcus. MRI reveals that the left-hemispheric bridge exte...

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