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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.
The reiterative nature of the cerebral cortex, in the sense that it is a vast array of repeating functional circuits, led to the idea that cortical evolution is governed by mechanisms regulating the addition of cortical columns, enabling additional functional areas to become specialized and incorporated into the brain.
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).
Cortical stimulation mapping led to the development of a homunculus for the motor and sensory cortices, which is a diagram showing the brain's connections to different areas of the body. An example is the cortical homunculus of the primary motor cortex and the somatosensory cortex, which are separated by the central sulcus.
As the result of this somatotopic organization of sensory inputs to the cortex, cortical representation of the body resembles a map (or homunculus). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, several groups began exploring the impacts of removing portions of the sensory inputs .
Their ability to make split-second moral assessments, a function of the prefrontal cortex of the brain, may not be fully developed, researchers say, a fact that may be familiar to any parent of teenagers. But in war, when 20-year-olds are licensed to kill, the stakes are far higher.
The primary visual cortex (V1, Brodmann's area 17) is the first cortical area to receive visual input. The stria of Gennari – a set of heavily myelinated, horizontally projecting axons within the termination zone of lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) input to V1 – provides an anatomical marker particular to V1.
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