Wizzy said:
This is especially for Neurosurgery residents and also for final year medical students.
1. What books did you learn from neuroanatomy?
2. What book(s) would you recommend now (after time has passed and you have some neuro experience), to one that considers neurosurgery as a very strong possibility!?
3. What atlases?
This is something that I think all medical students and early neurosurgical residents struggle with to some degree or another. It is simply the most difficult anatomy in the entire body.
Here's how you start. First just learn the names, don't worry about what they mean... but this can be difficult, because you don't know what they mean. So don't focus on every little itty bitty structure. Learn the basics. Topographical anatomy of the different gryrus and sulci while looking at the brain's surface from above, from lateral side, from underneath, and with a mid-sagital section. Also learn with the frontal lobes and temporal lobes separated to expose the insula. Learn the brainstem bumps and grooves.
Next, I would start adding in some functional anatomy. Easiest is spinal cord. Learn all the tracts, which ones go up, which go down, what they all do. Where they cross. How they talk to each other, and their final destinations. After you learn the spinal cord, I recommend learining the brainstem. This is pretty daunting, but very important.
Then start thinking in terms of functional systems (vision, hearing, smell, taste, balance, movement, etc) and basically plot out the transmission from receptor to cortex, or from cortex to effector. for instance... vision bipolar cells, retinal ganglion cells, optic nerve, optic chiasm, optic tract, LGB (lateral geniculate body of thalamus), Loop of henle OR optic radiations via retrolenticular internal capsule, to Occiptal poles (area 17,) to layer IV of the cortex, stripe of genari. Do this for all the other sensory modalities.
Then learn thalamus. Then Cerebellum. Then Olfaction/Limbics/Hypothalamus (which is really painful), Through the basal ganglia in, then add cortical function (which is easiest and least understood)
have fun.
