The vertical occipital fasciculus is a fascicle of

white matter White matter refers to areas of the central nervous system (CNS) that are mainly made up of myelinated axons, also called tracts. Long thought to be passive tissue, white matter affects learning and brain functions, modulating the distribution ...

running vertically in the rear of the brain. It is found at least in primates. It "is the only major fiber bundle connecting dorsolateral and ventrolateral

visual cortex The visual cortex of the brain is the area of the cerebral cortex that processes visual information. It is located in the occipital lobe. Sensory input originating from the eyes travels through the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus and ...

Early discovery

Originally depicted by

Carl Wernicke Carl (or Karl) Wernicke (; ; 15 May 1848 – 15 June 1905) was a German physician, anatomist, psychiatrist and neuropathologist. He is known for his influential research into the pathological effects of specific forms of encephalopathy and also ...

, who called it the ''senkrechte Occipitalbündel'' (vertical occipital bundle), the region was practically lost to scientific knowledge during the twentieth century.

Theodor Meynert Theodor Hermann Meynert (15 June 1833 – 31 May 1892) was a German-Austrian psychiatrist, neuropathologist and anatomist born in Dresden. Meynert believed that disturbances in brain development could be a predisposition for psychiatric illness a ...

had described the brain's other white matter tracts as being horizontally oriented, and did not accept Wernicke's finding. Heinrich Obersteiner named the area the "fasciculus occipitalis perpendicularis", and

Heinrich Sachs Heinrich Sachs (1863 - 1928) was a late 19th and early 20th century German neurologist and neuroanatomist best known for his atlas of the brain's white matter. Scientific career Heinrich Sachs was born in Halberstadt, Germany, in 1863. He studied ...

named the area the "stratum profundum convexitatis". It appeared in a 1918 edition of

Gray's Anatomy ''Gray's Anatomy'' is a reference book of human anatomy written by Henry Gray, illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter, and first published in London in 1858. It has gone through multiple revised editions and the current edition, the 42nd (Octob ...

, but fell into obscurity. A

diffusion tensor imaging Diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI or DW-MRI) is the use of specific MRI sequences as well as software that generates images from the resulting data that uses the diffusion of water molecules to generate contrast in MR images. It ...

(DTI) study in 2004 noted an area of short-range association fibers in the lateral

occipital lobe The occipital lobe is one of the four major lobes of the cerebral cortex in the brain of mammals. The name derives from its position at the back of the head, from the Latin ''ob'', "behind", and ''caput'', "head". The occipital lobe is the vi ...

, which they noted corresponded to the VoF.

Structure and function

The vertical occipital fasciculus consists of long nerve fibers making connections between vision sub-regions in the rear of the brain. Research indicates that it is related to both vision and cognition, since injury to it can cause reading impairment.{{Cite web, url=http://ilabs.washington.edu/i-labs-news/reading-and-brain-rediscovery-major-pathway, title = Reading and the Brain: Rediscovery of a Major Pathway | Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (I-LABS)

Early discovery

Structure and function

References

Further reading