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This cortex is typically represented as a sensory homunculus which orients the specific body parts and their respective locations upon the homunculus. Areas such as the appendages, digits, penis, [2] and face can draw their sensory locations upon the somatosensory cortex. The areas which are finely controlled (e.g., the digits) have larger ...
A 2-D model of cortical sensory homunculus. A cortical homunculus (from Latin homunculus 'little man, miniature human' [1] [2]) is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a neurological "map" of the areas and portions of the human brain dedicated to processing motor functions, and/ or sensory functions, for different parts of the body.
Like other sensory areas, there is a map of sensory space in this location, called the sensory homunculus. The primary somatosensory cortex was initially defined from surface stimulation studies of Wilder Penfield , and parallel surface potential studies of Bard, Woolsey, and Marshall.
The homunculus is commonly used today in scientific disciplines such as psychology as a teaching or memory tool to describe the distorted scale model of a human drawn or sculpted to reflect the relative space human body parts occupy on the somatosensory cortex (the sensory homunculus) and the motor cortex (the motor homunculus). Both the motor ...
A sensory map is an area of the brain which responds to sensory stimulation, and are spatially organized according to some feature of the sensory stimulation. In some cases the sensory map is simply a topographic representation of a sensory surface such as the skin, cochlea, or retina. In other cases it represents other stimulus properties ...
The primary sensory areas receive signals from the sensory nerves and tracts by way of relay nuclei in the thalamus. Primary sensory areas include the visual cortex of the occipital lobe, the auditory cortex in parts of the temporal lobe and insular cortex, and the somatosensory cortex in the parietal lobe.
The term primary comes from the fact that these cortical areas are the first level in a hierarchy of sensory information processing in the brain. This should not be confused with the function of the primary motor cortex , which is the last site in the cortex for processing motor commands.
The sensory cortex can refer sometimes to the primary somatosensory cortex, or it can be used as a term for the primary and secondary cortices of the different senses (two cortices each, on left and right hemisphere): the visual cortex on the occipital lobes, the auditory cortex on the temporal lobes, the primary olfactory cortex on the uncus of the piriform region of the temporal lobes, the ...