A cortical homunculus (from Latin homunculus 'little man, miniature
human') is a distorted representation of the human body, based on a
neurological "map" of the areas and proportions of the human brain dedicated
to processing motor functions, or sensory functions, for different parts of
the body. Nerve fibres—conducting somatosensory information from all over the
body—terminate in various areas of the parietal lobe in the cerebral cortex,
forming a representational map of the body.
Findings from the 2010s and early 2020s began to call this interpretation into
question, and research is ongoing in this field.
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