Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle (July 15, 1918 – January 11, 2015) was an American neurophysiologist and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University.
[2][3][4][5][6][7] Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle was born on July 15, 1918, in Shelbyville, Kentucky as the third of five children into a family of "farmers, industrial entrepreneurs, or builders of railroads".
He entered Roanoke College in Salem, Virginia in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, where he majored in chemistry and finished in 3 years.
[9] In 1938 he started medical school at Johns Hopkins University where his teachers included William Mansfield Clark, Philip Bard, Adolf Meyer, Arnold Rice Rich, Maxwell Wintrobe, and Warfield Longcope.
Although there were several notable works from his laboratory, the highest profile early paper appeared in 1968,[10] a study explaining the neural basis of Flutter and vibration by the action of peripheral mechanoreceptors.
[20] Jeff Hawkins in his book On Intelligence describes Mountcastle's 1978 article, An organizing principle..., as "the rosetta stone of neuroscience".