Vernon B. Mountcastle (1918–2015)

Excerpt

Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle, once dubbed “the Jacques Cousteau of the [cerebral] cortex” [1], is widely considered the father of modern neuroscience, thanks to his outstanding achievements in the 1950s when he pioneered neurophysiological studies of the cortex. In his 1981 Nobel Lecture, David Hubel referred to Vernon Mountcastle as “[the person] whose discovery of columns in the somatosensory cortex was surely the single most important contribution to the understanding of cerebral cortex since Cajal” [2], honouring his fundamental legacy in the comprehension of perceptual complexity (Fig. 1).

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