For the brain to construct a comprehensive percept of the sensory world, information from the different senses must converge onto individual neurons within the central nervous system. As a consequence, how these neurons convert convergent sensory input into multisensory information is an important question facing neuroscience today. Recent physiological studies have demonstrated the presence of a robust population of multisensory neurons in the lateral bank of the rostral suprasylvian sulcus (LRSS) in adult ferret (Keniston et al, 2008). The LRSS is a region situated between somatosensory and auditory cortices, where bimodal (somatosensory-auditory) neurons occupy the greatest percentage of the sensory-responsive cell population. The present study was designed to evaluate the anatomical connections that underlie these multisensory features. Injections of neuroanatomical tracer were first made into the LRSS. After transport and histological processing, microscopy revealed retrogradely-labeled cell bodies in identified regions of cortex and thalamus. The resultant analysis showed that the greatest number of projections to LRSS originated in auditory and somatosensory cortex. Of these, auditory cortex contributed a greater proportion of inputs. These anatomical data support the idea that LRSS is a multisensory cortex that receives primarily bimodal input from auditory and somatosensory sources.

Environmental events simultaneously transduced by more than one sensory modality underlie multisensory processing in the CNS. While most studies of multisensory processing examine functional effects, none have evaluated the influence of local or columnar circuitry. The goal of the present study is to examine of local features of the ferret lateral rostral suprasylvian sulcus (LRSS), a multisensory cortex. Immunostaining revealed the cytoarchitectonic features of the LRSS: thick supragranular layers, a narrow layer IV, and moderately stained but differentiated infragranular layers. Golgi-Cox techniques were used with light microscopy and digital reconstruction to document neuronal morphology. Among the 90 reconstructed neurons, 4 distinct forms or pyramidal and 2 types of non-pyramidal neurons were found. Measurement of maximal dendritic spread indicates that a cortical column in the LRSS was 250.9 um in diameter. These results describe local features of the LRSS upon which future experiments of intrinsic circuitry will be based.