ABSTRACT
This is a brief summary of brain anatomy in the context of epilepsy. It reviews the gross anatomical and some ultrastructural details as a primer for those with little or no clinical orientation. This is by no means exhaustive, and there are ample texts for those wishing more detail (Nieuwenhuys et al. 1988; Carpenter 1991; Sheppard 2004; Andersen et al. 2007; Miller and Cummings 2007). As was so appropriately stated during the Fourth International Workshop on Seizure Prediction (IWSP4) in Kansas City by Walter Freeman, “We don’t have a language that describes brain function.” We are left then with trying to describe the brain from a structural perspective and implying function from physiological experimentation on animals and humans. It might be equally important to mention that, along with not having a language to describe brain function, we have little way to measure brain function-whatever that might be-if this is in fact what we are doing with various technologies currently at our disposal.
