This is the only scientific paper that I've ever written in which a reviewer requested more “juicy details” of the history of the development of a set of ideas. Okay, here goes. When I arrived at MGH in 1996 the prototypes of some of the tools that would become FreeSurfer were being used mainly in the study of retinotopic representations in early visual cortex. This resulted in a set of studies that helped lay the framework of our current understanding of the human visual system (Hadjikhani et al., 1998; Halgren et al., 1999; Mendola et al., 1999; Sasaki et al., 2001; Sereno et al., 1995; Tootell et al., 1995, 1997,1998). These studies almost never happened, as Anders and Marty seriously considered working with Brian Wandell and colleagues at Stanford as opposed to Roger Tootell's MGH group. The decision to come to MGH led to a fierce competition with the remarkably productive Stanford group, who published a collection of seminal papers on the use of fMRI for mapping visual cortex (e.g. (Boynton et al., 1996; Engel et al., 1997; Teo et al., 1997; Wandell, 1999; Wandell et al., 1999)).
