Corpus callosum

the human brain
Corpus callosum from above.
Median sagittal section of brain. The relations of the pia mater are indicated by the red color. ("Corpus callosum" visible at center, in light gray.)
Identifiers
MeSH	D003337
NeuroNames	191
NeuroLex ID	birnlex_1087
TA98	A14.1.09.241
TA2	5604
FMA	86464
Anatomical terms of neuroanatomy

The corpus callosum is the largest white matter structure in the mammalian brain. It consists mostly of contralateral axon projections. It appears as a wide, flat region just ventral to (below) the cortex. It is missing in monotremes and marsupials. It is made up of 200-250 million nerve fibers. The corpus callosum connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Most (but certainly not all) communication between regions in different halves of the brain are carried over the corpus callosum. The posterior portion of the corpus callosum is called the splenium; the anterior is called the genu (or "knee"); between the two is the body. The most anterior part is the rostrum. Agenesis of the corpus callosum is a complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum in humans.

Sexual dimorphism

In humans, disputed claims have been made about the importance for gender difference of a difference in size between the corpus callosum in males and females, and analogous racial claims. RB Bean, a Philadelphia anatomist, suggested in 1906 that the "exceptional size of the corpus callosum may mean exceptional intellectual activity" and claimed gender differences which were refuted by Franklin Mall, the director of his own laboratory (Bishop and Wahlsten, 1997).

Of much more substantial popular impact was a 1982 Science article (de Lacoste-Utamsing and Holloway) claiming to be the first report of a reliable sex difference in human brain morphology and arguing for relevance to cognitive gender differences. This paper appears to be the source of a large number of lay explanations of perceived male-female difference in behaviour: for example Newsweek stated in 1992 that the corpus callosum was "Often wider in the brains of women than in those of men, it may allow for greater cross talk between the hemispheres—possibly the basis for woman’s "intuition". It has also been used, for example, as the explanation of an increased single-task orientation of male, relative to female, learners; a smaller male organ is said to make it harder for the left and right sides of the brain to work together and to explain a feminine ability to multitask.

The relationship between known gender-specific biology (such as males having, in general, higher testosterone levels than females) and claims about behaviour (such as human males being more competitive) remains a highly contested one. Unusually, the scientific dispute in the case of the corpus callosum is not about the implications of biological difference, but whether such a difference actually exists. A substantial review paper (Bishop and Wahlsten, 1997) performed a meta-analysis of 49 studies and found, contrary to de Lacoste-Utamsing and Holloway, that males have a larger corpus callosum, a relationship that is true whether or not account is taken of larger male brain size. Bishop and Wahlstein found that "(t)he widespread belief that women have a larger splenium than men and consequently think differently is untenable." However, more recent studies using new techniques revealed morphological sex differences in human corpus callosum (Dubb et al., 2003; Shin et al., 2005). Whether, and to what extent, these morphological differences are associated with behavioural and cognitive differences between males and females is unclear.

Studies of the Physiology of the Callosum

One of the first neurophysiological examinations of the corpus callosum was made a few years after Myers' experiments by David Whitteridge, then in Edinburgh. Whitteridge realized that for a band of nerve fibers to join homologous, mirror-symmetric parts of area 17 made no sense. No reason could possibly exist for wanting a cell in the left hemisphere, concerned with points somewhere out in the right field of vision, to be connected to a cell on the other side, concerned with points equally far out in the left field. To check this further Whitteridge surgically severed the optic tract on the right side, just behind the optic chiasm, thus detaching the right occipital lobe from the out- side world—except, of course, for any input that area might receive from the left occipital lobe via the corpus callosum, as you can see from the illustration on this page. He then looked for responses by shining light in the eyes and recording from the right hemisphere with wire electrodes placed on the corti- cal surface. He did record responses, but the electrical waves he observed appeared only at the inner border of area 17, a region that gets its visual input from a long, narrow, vertical strip bisecting the visual field: when he used smaller spots of light, they produced responses only when they were flashed in parts of the visual field at or near the vertical midline. Cooling the cortex on the opposite side, thus temporarily putting it out of commission, abolished the responses, as did cooling the corpus callosum. Clearly, the corpus callosum could not be joining all of area 17 on the two sides, but just a small part subserving the vertical midline of the visual field. Anatomical experiments had already suggested such a result. Only the parts of area 17 very close to the border between areas 17 and 18 sent axons across to the other side, and these seemed to end, for the most part, in area 18, close to its border with area 17. If we assume that the input the cortex gets from the geniculates is strictly from contralateral visual fields—left field to right cortex and right field to left cortex—the presence of corpus-callosum connections between hemispheres should result in one hemisphere's receiving input from more than one-half the visual fields: the connections should produce an over- lap in the visual-field territories feeding into the two hemispheres. That is, in fact, what we find. Two electrodes, one in each hemisphere near the 17-18 borders, frequently record cells whose fields overlap by several degrees. Torsten Wiesel and I soon made microelectrode recordings directly from the part of the corpus callosum containing visual fibers, the most posterior por- tion. We found that nearly all the fibers that we could activate by visual stimuli responded exactly like ordinary cells of area 17, with simple or complex prop- erties, selective for orientation and responding usually to both eyes. They all had receptive fields lying very close to the vertical midline, either below, above, or in the center of gaze, as shown in the diagram on this page. Perhaps the most esthetically pleasing neurophysiological demonstration of corpus-callosum function came from the work ofGiovanni Berlucchi and Gi- acomo Rizzolatti in Pisa in 1968. Having cut the optic chiasm along the mid- line, they made recordings from area 17, close to the 17-18 border on the right side, and looked for cells that could be driven binocularly. Obviously any binocular cell in the visual cortex on the right side must receive input from the right eye directly (via the geniculate) and from the left eye by way of the left hemisphere and corpus callosum. Each binocular receptive field spanned the vertical midline, with the part to the left responding to the right eye and the part to the right responding to the left eye. Other properties, including orien- tation selectivity, were identical, as shown in the illustration on the facing page. This result showed clearly that one function of the corpus callosum is to connect cells so that their fields can span the midline. It therefore cements together the two halves of the visual world. To imagine this more vividly, suppose that our cortex had originally been constructed out of one piece in- stead of being subdivided into two hemispheres; area 17 would then be one large plate, mapping the entire visual field. Neighboring cells would of course be richly interconnected, so as to produce the various response properties, including movement responses and orientation selectivity. Now suppose a dicta- really happened, since the brain had two hemispheres long before the cerebral cortex evolved. This experiment ofBerlucchi and Rizzolatti provides the most vivid exam- ple I know of the remarkable specificity of neural connections. The cell illus- trated on this page, and presumably a million other callosally connected cells like it, derives a single orientation selectivity both through local connections to nearby cells and through connections coming from a region of cortex in the other hemisphere, several inches away, from cells with the same orientation selectivity and immediately adjacent receptive-field positions—to say nothing of all the other matching attributes, such as direction selectivity, end-stopping, and degree of complexity. Every callosally connected cell in the visual cortex must get its input from cells in the opposite hemisphere with exactly matching properties. We have all kinds of evidence for such selective connectivity in the nervous system, but I can think of none that is so beautifully direct. Visual fibers such as these make up only a small proportion ofcallosal fibers. In the somatosensory system, anatomical axon-transport studies, similar to the radioactive-amino-acid eye injections described in earlier chapters, show that the corpus callosum similarly connects areas of cortex that are activated by skin or joint receptors near the midline of the body, on the trunk, back, or face, but does not connect regions concerned with the extremities, the feet and hands. Every cortical area is connected to several or many other cortical areas on the same side. For example, the primary visual cortex is connected to area 18 (visual area 2), to the medial temporal area (MT), to visual area 4, and to one or two others. Often a given area also projects to several areas in the opposite hemisphere through the callosum or, in some few cases, by the anterior com- missure. We can therefore view these commissural connections simply as one special kind of cortico-cortico connection. A moment's thought tells us these links must exist: if I tell you that my left hand is cold or that I see something to my left, I am using my cortical speech area, which is located in several small regions in my left hemisphere, to formulate the words. (This may not be true, because I am left handed.) But the information concerning my left field of vision or left hand feeds into my right hemisphere: it must therefore cross over to the speech area if I am going to talk about it. The crossing takes place in the corpus callosum. In a series of studies beginning in the early i96os, Roger Sperry, now at Cal Tech, and his colleagues showed that a human whose corpus callosum had been cut (to treat epilepsy) could no longer talk about events that had entered through the right hemisphere. These subjects provided a mine of new information on various kinds of cortical function, including thought and consciousness. The original papers, which appeared in the journal Brain, make fascinating reading and should be fully understandable to anyone reading the present book.

See also

• Alien hand syndrome
• Agenesis of the corpus callosum
• Split-brain
• Septo-optic dysplasia = deMorsier syndrome

External links

• Stained brain slice images which include the "corpus callosum" at the BrainMaps project

References

• de Lacoste-Utamsing, C., Holloway, R. L. "Sexual dimorphism in the human corpus callosum." Science, 216, 1431–1432, 1982.
• Bishop, K.M. and D. Wahlsten. "Sex Differences in the Human Corpus Callosum: Myth or Reality?", Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, Vol. 21, No. 5, pp. 581–601, 1997.
• Dubb A, Gur R, Avants B, Gee J. "Characterization of sexual dimorphism in the human corpus callosum." Neuroimage. 2003 Sep;20(1):512-9.
• Shin YW, Kim DJ, Ha TH, Park HJ, Moon WJ, Chung EC, Lee JM, Kim IY, Kim SI, Kwon JS. "Sex differences in the human corpus callosum: diffusion tensor imaging study." Neuroreport. 2005 May 31;16(8):795-8.