Vernon B. Mountcastle (born July 15, 1918 in Shelbyville, Kentucky) is a retired neuroscientist from the Johns Hopkins University. He discovered and characterized the columnar organization of the cerebral cortex in the 1950s. This discovery was a turning point in investigations of the cerebral cortex as nearly all cortical studies of sensory function after Mountcastle's 1957 paper [1] on the somatosensory cortex used columnar organization as their basis. Indeed, David Hubel in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech said Mouncastle's "discovery of columns in the somatosensory cortex was surely the single most important contribution to the understanding of cerebral cortex since Cajal [2]. Mountcastle's interest in cognition, specifically perception, led him to guide his lab to studies that linked perception and neural responses in the 1960s. Although there were several notable works from his lab, the highest profile early paper was in 1968 [3], a study explaining the neural basis of flutter and vibration by the action of peripheral mechanoreceptors. Mountcastle's devotion to studies of single unit neural coding evolved through his leadership in the Bard Labs of Neurophysiology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which was for many years the only institute in the world devoted to this sub-field, and its work is continued today in the Krieger Mind/Brain Institute. He is University ProfessorEmeritus of Neuroscience Johns Hopkins University.
Professor Mountcastle is a graduate of Roanoke College in Virginia.
Bibliography
Vernon Mountcastle (1978), "An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function: The Unit Model and the Distributed System", The Mindful Brain (Gerald M. Edelman and Vernon B. Mountcastle, eds.) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
