Anatomical substrates for primate executive cortical function

在研究大脑时，许多人试图寻找参与各种过程的不同区域中细胞和电路组织的相似性。虽然初步看来，这可能是理解大脑如何工作的合理方法，但它也忽略了大脑如此复杂的原因：大脑结构的多样性。在19世纪末和20世纪初，先锋解剖学家抓住了人类大脑结构的多样性。对大脑皮层回路的研究达到了顶峰，对大脑功能的理解也出现了复兴。然而，这些研究人员受到当时可用技术的限制。随着新方法的出现，科学家们可以探索细胞（突触）之间的个体连接，探测突触的结构和传输，并记录活神经元，新的和令人兴奋的发现。然而，这些方法非常耗时，研究必须更加集中。因此，在世纪后半叶，有一种趋势是将一个皮层区域的发现外推到整个皮层。一个物种高度专业化的感觉皮层的解剖学和功能发现甚至更不稳定，它们被投射到其他远亲物种身上。这种想法导致了神经科学的黑暗时代。人们普遍认为存在一个标准电路。因此，不同皮层区域之间的功能差异完全归因于它们的投射来源。这个项目的中心论题是研究前额叶的细胞结构和皮层回路。我们希望该项目将提供另一个步骤的途径，导致了解心灵。

When studying the brain, many have been tempted to look for similarities in organization of cells and circuitry in different regions involved in various processes. While, at a first approximation, this may be a reasonable approach to understand how the brain works, it also ignores what makes the brain so complex: the diversity in its structure. In the late 19th, and early 20th, centuries, pioneering anatomists seized on the diversity in structure of the human brain. The study of cortical circuitry that underlies the diversity in cortical processing reached a zenith and there was a renaissance in understanding of brain function. These researchers were, however, limited by techniques available to them at the time. With the advent of new methodologies which allowed scientists to explore individual connections between cells (synapses), to probe structure and transmission across synapses, and to record from live neurones, new and exciting discoveries were made. However, these methodologies are highly time consuming and studies became necessarily more focussed. As a result, there was a tendency in the later half of the 20th century to extrapolate findings from one cortical area to cortex in general. Even more precarious, anatomical and functional findings in highly specialized sensory cortex of one species were projected to other distantly related species. Such thinking lead to a dark age in neuroscience. It became widely accepted that there exists a canonical circuit. Consequently, differences in function between different cortical areas were attributed solely to the source of their projections. The central thesis of this project is to study aspects of cell structure and cortical circuitry in the prefrontal lobe. We hope that the project will provide another step in the pathway that leads to understanding the mind.