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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).
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 homunculus argument is an informal fallacy whereby a concept is explained in terms of the concept itself, recursively, without first defining or explaining the original concept. [1] This fallacy arises most commonly in the theory of vision .
Precentral gyrus sensory homunculus. Somatotopy [a] is the point-for-point correspondence of an area of the body to a specific point on the central nervous system. [1] Typically, the area of the body corresponds to a point on the primary somatosensory cortex (postcentral gyrus). This cortex is typically represented as a sensory homunculus which ...
Homunculus Nebula, a part of the Eta Carinae Nebula; Cortical homunculus, also known as the Penfield homunculus, a physical representation of the primary motor cortex of the rest of the body; Fetiform teratoma, a rare cyst having a fetal structure; The homunculus argument is a fallacy arising most commonly in the theory of vision
For example, sensory information from the foot projects to one cortical site and the projections from the hand target in another site. As the result of this somatotopic organization of sensory inputs to the cortex, cortical representation of the body resembles a map (or homunculus).
One common diagram of the somatotopic map is the cortical homunculus. This illustration is a fairly accurate representation of how much cortical area represents each body part or region. It also maps what part of the cortex represents each region 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.