Introduction

This material has been put together to introduce you to the skull and the cranial nerves. We are going to lecture on some of this material, but in lecture we'll be focusing on specific aspects of the skull and the cranial nerves, and we won't be doing this sort of extensive overview. 

You should work through and have a basic understanding of this material before classes start in January. The foundation you gain here will be helpful not only for anatomy but also for neuroanatomy and your other brain sciences courses.

There are 5 parts of this material, and mostly the parts build on one another.

1. Learn the names of the bones of the skull. This is a must.

2. Learn the names and locations of some of the more detailed features of those bones. These are typically sites for muscle attachment, or where one bone attaches to another. You should look through this once or twice, and then refer back to this section as necessary. Don’t spend a lot of time just memorizing all the processes.

3. Learn the names of the holes (foraminae) in the bones of the skull. These are places where nerves and blood vessels pass through the skull. Familiarize yourself with the holes, you’ll come back to them as part of learning the cranial nerves.

4. Learning the basics of the cranial nerves themselves; their numbers and names, their modalities, and their motor targets and/or sensory territories.

5. Matching the foraminae with the cranial nerves. You should be able to go in either direction; for a given nerve you should know the foraminae it passes through, and for a given formaina you should know what branches of what nerves pass through it.

It’s unrealistic to think you’ll know all this material cold on the first day of the block, but you should know all the bones, and the names of numbers of the cranial nerves and what they do, and have a pretty solid understanding of where the nerves and their branches are going to/coming from, and what holes they pass through on the way.

You’ll continue to work on this material, and solidify your understanding of it, and add detail to it, as you work through the first block. It may seem like a lot of material at first, but that’s only because it is a lot of material. That’s why it’s helpful to get a running start at it before the block begins in January.