www.DMDstudent.com

The best thing about this class is some of it coincides with the head and neck anatomy portion of dental school and you can learn while using the bathroom. Learning the cranial nerves can be a difficult thing to do. Especially when trying to juggle all the other classes and restorative projects. My undergraduate anatomy teacher Dr. Michael Shively taught a couple of pneumonics to help remember what the cranial nerves are and what general function they perform (motor, sensory, or both).

The cranial nerves in order from 1 to 12 are, olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, vestibulocochlear, glossopharyngeal, vagus, accessory, and hypoglossal. To remember these we were taught a small saying: On Old Olympuses Towering Top A Fine Victorian Gentleman Viewed A Hawk. The first letter in each word corresponds to a cranial nerve. I also realize that there are others out there including some dirty ones, but this seems to work better than the other ones and I have taught it to several of my classmates. To figure out whether the cranial nerve is sensory, motor, or both another small pneumonic was taught to us. Following the cranial nerves again in order from 1 to 12 the pneumonic is as follows: Six Sailors Made Merry But My Brother Said Bad Business My Man. S=sensory, M=Motor, B=Both. So from the above pneumonic the word Six=cranial nerve I is sensory ONLY. The word Brother means that the facial nerve (CN VII) is BOTH sensory and motor. Man=CN XII is motor ONLY. To memorize this I would suggest you print off your own sheet and put this on the wall next to your toilet. You will have it memorized in a week of ‘business as usual’.

Doing things like this can help out in classes like neuroanatomy when there is sometimes an obscene amount of information to get straight in your brain. Learning the basics is the best way to start and a firm grasp on the cranial nerves is a great place to start. So what else do you learn in neuroanatomy? We started off with the spinal cord. Sensory pathways from touch and itch to muscle reactions. For example an itch on your hand has a certain type of neuron. The neuron will synapse in a particular spot and will have its cell body in a specific location. It will take a pathway from the hand all the way to the brain. From here it will initiate a reaction. The reaction will also follow a brain pathway and exit through the spinal cord. Other examples like what happens when you hear a loud sound. CN VIII is stimulated but also your head and neck muscles to turn towards the sound. These things all stimulate specific parts of the brain and you can decipher where the sound is coming from and what is making the sound (a baby or a car horn, etc.)

We also learned how these pathways can evolve and learn new things like how to do a crown prep. Each pathway is different with various locations of cell bodies and synapses onto various nuclei. We did have to identify a few histological slides of various structures in the brain and spinal cord. Like distinguishing the caudate putamen from the substansia nigra from the internal capsule. What I found worked well was to get all the pictures and make a quick power point presentation where the picture pops up on the first slide. Then add animation. Make an arrow appear pointing to the structure you need to be able to identify. Then the next animation you add the structures name. So when you watch the slide show this is how it works: Picture pops up, then an arrow, then you see if you know it and the next slide has the answer. Hope that makes sense. If you have a lot of slides, divide the work up with your study buddies.

Neuroanatomy is one of those classes that is initially very confusing, at least to me. At times I was so frustrated that I wanted to vomit on my book and burn it. Words like vestibulospinothalamic tract and latral geniculate nucleus can cause your head to tail spin into remediation. Remember to make it easy and learn the basics first. If you still can’t get it then maybe some more fiber and trips to the toilet will help. ☺ Good luck!