Centenary of Brodmann's map — conception and fate

To celebrate the centenary of Brodmann's brain map, Zilles and Amunts review his pioneering work and its legacy. This article reconsiders the original concepts described by Brodmann and the use of his map for interpreting functional and structural neuroimaging data today. Rarely in the history of neuroscience has a single illustration been as influential as the cytoarchitectonic map of the human brain published by Korbinian Brodmann in his monograph from 1909. The map presents the segregation of the cerebral cortex into 43 areas, as visible in cell body-stained histological sections. More importantly, Brodmann provided a comparative neuroanatomical approach and discussed ontogenetic and pathological aspects as well as structural–functional correlations. One hundred years later, a large number of neuroscientists still use Brodmann's map for localizing neuroimaging data obtained in the living human brain.