Today, I participated in the lunch on seminar in RIKEN BSI, which Dr.Tonegawa proposed. There were two topics. Both topics were very impressive. Especially, second presentator proposed new functional unit, domain in the brain. It has been considered that functional unit in the brain is a columns which is hundreds micrometer because the column has the information such as figure recognition (circle, triangle or square). However, he said that brain regions in the prefrontal cortex of monkeys, which are responsible for the recognition of monkey face, human face or the other animal, were more bigger. He called them domains. How do columnar structures represent the domain (such as human face recognition domain), the previous director of RIKEN BSI said.
明日からSFNに参加。

http://www.sfn.org/am2009/