The vertical occipital fasciculus, or VOF, is identified in a postmortem human brain in 1909, but labeled with a different name. Knowledge of this piece of anatomy had fallen out of medical texts until recently. | Curran 1909
While examining colorful 3-D brain images, Stanford psychology graduate student Jason Yeatman spotted a part of the brain he’d never learned about in class. But what he thought was a discovery was actually a rediscovery — a snippet of brain anatomy lost to science for decades.
The vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF) debuted in an atlas by German psychiatrist and anatomist Carl Wernicke in 1881. It had all but vanished from scientific literature when Yeatman noticed it. He published his find of the VOF, a bundle of white-matter fibers near the back of the brain, in 2013 and helped show its involvement in reading.
Yeatman, now an assistant professor at the University of ...
