The musical centers of the brain: Vladimir E. Larionov (1857–1929) and the functional neuroanatomy of auditory perception

• V. E. Larionov was a physician-researcher and a pioneer of otoneurology.
• He precisely mapped cortical auditory areas in relation to the tonotopic nature of their cell organization.
• He further provided clinical data on the ‘musical centers of the brain’ and related pathologies.
• He contributed to Bekhterev’s concepts on ‘conduction paths in the brain’.

In 1899 a landmark paper entitled “On the musical centers of the brain” was published in Pflügers Archiv, based on work carried out in the Anatomo-Physiological Laboratory of the Neuropsychiatric Clinic of Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857–1927) in St. Petersburg, Imperial Russia. The author of that paper was Vladimir E. Larionov (1857–1929), a military doctor and devoted brain scientist, who pursued the problem of the localization of function in the canine and human auditory cortex. His data detailed the existence of tonotopy in the temporal lobe and further demonstrated centrifugal auditory pathways emanating from the auditory cortex and directed to the opposite hemisphere and lower brain centers. Larionov’s discoveries have been largely considered as findings of the Bekhterev school. Perhaps this is why there are limited resources on Larionov, especially keeping in mind his military medical career and the fact that after 1917 he just seems to have practiced otorhinolaryngology in Odessa. Larionov died two years after Bekhterev’s mysterious death of 1927. The present study highlights the pioneering contributions of Larionov to auditory neuroscience, trusting that the life and work of Vladimir Efimovich will finally, and deservedly, emerge from the shadow of his celebrated master, Vladimir Mikhailovich.

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