A major pathway of the human brain involved in visual perception, attention and movement — and overlooked by many researchers for more than a century — is finally getting its moment in the sun. 
 
 In 2012, researchers made note of a pathway in a region of the brain associated with reading, but "we couldn't find it in any atlas," said Jason Yeatman, a research scientist at the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. "We'd thought we had discovered a new pathway that no one else had noticed before." 
 
 A quick investigation showed that the pathway, known as the vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF), was not actually unknown. Famed neuroscientist Carl Wernicke discovered the pathway in 1881, during the dissection of a monkey brain that was most likely a macaque. [10 Things You Didn't Know About the Brain] 
 
 But besides Wernicke's discovery, and a few other mentions throughout the years, the VOF is largely absent from studies of the human brain. This made Yeatman and his colleagues wonder, "How did a whole piece of brain anatomy get forgotten?" he said. 
 
 The researchers immersed themselves in century-old brain atlases and studies, trying to decipher when and why the VOF went missing from mainstream scientific literature. They also scanned the brains of 37 individuals, and found an algorithm that can help present-day researchers pinpoint the elusive pathway. 
 
 The study provides a comprehensive look at the VOF's history, said Dr. Jeremy Schmahmann, a professor of neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new research. Schmahmann co-wrote the book "Fiber Pathways of the Brain" (Oxford University Press, 2006), which describes how the VOF is structured in the brain of a monkey and a human. 
 
 The new study confirms the VOF's location in the human brain "and then presents a coherent discussion about how it could be relevant," said Schmahmann, who is also a director of the Laboratory for Neuroanatomy and Cerebellar Neurobiology at Massachusetts General Hospital. 
 
 Teacher-student dispute? 
 
 The VOF may have been the victim of a disagreement between Wernicke and his famous teacher, Theodor Meynert, a German-Austrian neuroanatomist. Meynert directed the psychiatric clinic at the University of Vienna, and also taught Sigmund Freud and the famed Russian neuropsychiatrist Sergei Korsakoff. 
 
 Wernicke is known for his 1874 discovery of Wernicke's area, a region of the brain essential for understanding written and spoken language. After his breakthrough, Wernicke studied in Meynert's lab for about six months in the late 1870s and early 1880s. 
 
 Neuroanatomist Theodor Meynert left out the vertical occipital fasciculus in the last article he published before his death in 1892. Credit: Jason Yeatman and Kevin Weiner, with permission from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 
 
 But although Wernicke also discovered the VOF, Meynert did not include it in any of his studies. It's possible that Meynert ignored the pathway because it broke one of his tenets about brain organization, Yeatman told Live Science. 
 
 "Meynert had proposed the original theory of the organization of these pathways," Yeatman said. "He proposed that, as a rule, they all go anterior-posterior, or basically from front to back, longitudinally across the brain." 
 
 The VOF, in contrast, goes up and down. "Wernicke's discovery contradicted this majorly accepted principle of brain organization," Yeatman said. 
 
 Other neuroanatomists found the VOF in the human brain, but the pathway sits largely unlabeled in brain atlases throughout history, Yeatman said. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] 
 
 Yet maybe Meynert didn't mean any harm, Schmahmann said. Meynert did not focus on fiber pathways in the occipital lobe, including, but not limited to the VOF. "Meynert's apparent non-discussion of these fiber systems may simply have reflected his interest and focus," Schmahmann said. 
 
 Moreover, the VOF's also went by many names, which may have pushed it into further obscurity. Atlases give it different labels, including "Wernicke's perpendicular fasciculus," "perpendicular occipital fasciculus of Wernicke" and "stratum profundum convexitatis." 
 
 Varying dissection techniques in the late 1800s and early 1900s also made the VOF hard to pinpoint. 
 
 "You're slicing with a knife and trying to look for structure. It's very easy to miss something if you slice it a different way," Yeatman said. 
 
 Pathway reintroduction 
 
 To remedy the confusion, Yeatman and his colleagues wrote an algorithm to help researchers find and identify the VOF. They used an MRI technique called diffusion-weighted imaging, which measures the size and direction of the brain's different pathways. 
 
 Brain illustrations that show the vertical occipital fasciculus, except for Ludwig Edinger's 1885 drawing, which like many other atlases left the region unlabeled throughout history. Credit: Jason Yeatman and Kevin Weiner, with permission from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. 
 
 After imaging the brains of 37 people, the researchers found that the VOF starts in the occipital lobe, a part of the brain that processes visual information. It then spreads out like a sheet, connecting different brain regions: those that help people perceive visual categories, such as words and faces, and those involved with eye movements, attention and motion perception, the researchers said. The pathway could therefore help explain how the brain connects the two types of visual perception, Schmahmann said. 
 
 "There has to be some way for that dichotomy to merge," he said, "and the Wernicke fascicle is one way for the 'where' and the 'what' streams in the visual modality to become a unified whole." 
 
 Interestingly, two case studies from the 1970s found that people with damage to the VOF lost their ability to read because they could no longer recognize words. Moreover, the VOF has different myelination, a coating on nerve cells that helps information move faster. 
 
 "We don't know what it means yet, but [the myelination differences are] very consistent across every subject," Yeatman said. "It opens up some new hypotheses, new directions to study: Why is this structure so different than the other neighboring pathways?" 
 
 The study, published today (Nov. 17) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may encourage researchers to include the VOF in future brain atlases, Yeatman said. 
 
 Follow Laura Geggel on Twitter @LauraGeggel. Follow Live Science @livescience, Facebook & Google+. Original article on Live Science. ||||| The vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF) is a major white-matter fascicle connecting dorsal and ventral visual cortex. Few vision scientists or cognitive neuroscientists are aware of the VOF's existence. The scarcity of papers on this important pathway stems from the contentious history surrounding its discovery by Wernicke in 1881. We review the conflict surrounding the classic, postmortem, VOF measurements, and we introduce modern, in vivo methods to precisely characterize the VOF's cortical terminations and unique tissue properties. The new VOF measurements provide insight into the communication between ventral stream regions involved in form perception and dorsal stream regions involved in eye movements and attention. 
 
 Abstract 
 
 The vertical occipital fasciculus (VOF) is the only major fiber bundle connecting dorsolateral and ventrolateral visual cortex. Only a handful of studies have examined the anatomy of the VOF or its role in cognition in the living human brain. Here, we trace the contentious history of the VOF, beginning with its original discovery in monkey by Wernicke (1881) and in human by Obersteiner (1888), to its disappearance from the literature, and recent reemergence a century later. We introduce an algorithm to identify the VOF in vivo using diffusion-weighted imaging and tractography, and show that the VOF can be found in every hemisphere (n = 74). Quantitative T1 measurements demonstrate that tissue properties, such as myelination, in the VOF differ from neighboring white-matter tracts. The terminations of the VOF are in consistent positions relative to cortical folding patterns in the dorsal and ventral visual streams. Recent findings demonstrate that these same anatomical locations also mark cytoarchitectonic and functional transitions in dorsal and ventral visual cortex. We conclude that the VOF is likely to serve a unique role in the communication of signals between regions on the ventral surface that are important for the perception of visual categories (e.g., words, faces, bodies, etc.) and regions on the dorsal surface involved in the control of eye movements, attention, and motion perception.
– In 2012, a team of researchers out of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences thought they'd stumbled upon a new pathway in the brain associated with reading that had somehow been glossed over by their predecessors. "We couldn't find it in any atlas," one researchers tells LiveScience. It turns out the pathway had indeed been identified before, first by well-known neuroscientist Carl Wernicke in 1881 (it's called the vertical occipital fasciculus, or VOF), but it was left largely unexplored and unlabeled in brain maps for the next century-plus. So the researchers set out to understand not only the pathway itself, but also why it's been so widely ignored, and they published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Thanks to new brain imaging of 37 people, the team learned that the VOF spreads out like a sheet from the occipital lobe, which processes visual information, and connects different brain regions that deal with motion perception, attention, and eye movements, as well as the perception of visual categories, like faces or words. This pathway—which, unlike most in the brain, travels up and down instead of side to side (which might explain why one prominent neuroscientist overlooked it)—may show how these different types of visual perception are connected. Thanks to two case studies dating back to the 1970s, researchers learned that people with damaged VOF could no longer recognize words and thus couldn't read. Even the nerve cell coating that helps move information quickly (called myelination) looks different in the VOF than elsewhere in the brain. (Check out what lack of sleep might be doing to your brain.)