Centenary of Christfried Jakob's discovery of the visceral brain: an unheeded precedence in affective neuroscience

Abstract

The benchmark discovery of the cingulate gyrus as a brain structure receiving stimuli from muscles and viscera (proprioception and interoception) is traced to a 1907/1908 article by neuropathologist Christfried Jakob. Further, the involvement of the mamillary bodies, anterior thalamic nucleus, cingulate cortex and hippocampus in the circuitry of the emotive brain (i.e. all elements of the 1937 'circuit of Papez') was published by Jakob in his 1911 and 1913 monographs on human and comparative neuroanatomy. In those works, Jakob also described the thalamocingulate projection, commonly attributed to a 1933 study by Le Gros Clark and Boggon, and introduced the term 'visceral brain', commonly attributed to a 1949 paper by MacLean. The present article includes the first English translations of Jakob's relevant passages, which incontrovertibly document his chronological priority in discovering the visceral brain and some of its key constituent elements.