Reticular Formation of the Brain

This volume contains the formal papers and discussions presented at the international symposium on the reticular formation of the brain held at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. The formal presentations number thirty-five. A glance at the titles of the papers reveals that it (the reticular formation) has turned into a system which, like a big flourishing and expanding business, has bought up all its competitors, or, in more prosaic terms, "parts of the temporal lobes, the red nuclei, the pituitary, parts of the cerebellar function" have disappeared into the reticular formation. This imprecision is manifest in the presentations. Many papers, such as that by Nauta and Kuypers on the ascending pathways in the brain stem reticular formation and that by the Scheibels on the microscopic anatomy underlying the integrative patterns in the reticular formation, deal with the reticular substance as it is generally understood; others gain their relationship to