It shows the homunculus stretched out over the brain’s surface, a small body with enlarged mouth, hands and feet, each part exaggerated in proportion to the amount of neural real estate occupied.

This cortical homunculus is how your brain sees your body from the inside. In the 1930s, Wilder Penfield performed surgeries on patients with epilepsy.

The homunculus that we know today was developed based on electrical stimulation of different parts of the cortex in more than 400 people undergoing brain surgery for epilepsy or to remove a tumor.

That map of the primary motor cortex — the motor homunculus — shows how this brain region is divided into sections assigned to each body part that can be controlled voluntarily (SN: 6/16/15).

Textbook homunculus diagram depicts how the brain controls individual body parts — the revamp could improve treatments for brain injury. Skip to main content. Thank you for visiting nature.com.

The mental homunculus—a self within the brain that in some way observes itself—goes back to Descartes, and is rooted in his mind/body dualism.

You, too, can be a homunculus! Skip to main content Psychology Today. Find a Therapist. Find a ... Consider a model of a homunculus based on topographical representations of the body in the brain.

All the surface of the human body is represented in the cerebral cortex in a transversal band ... the 3D representation of that map forms the known sensory homunculus. Skip to main content. ...

Since the 1930s, the so-called homunculus map has shown how different parts of the brain's motor cortex may control movement to different parts of the body. But it may be missing an important ...

For brain surgeons, Penfield’s map was a practical boon, helping them plan out their surgeries. But for scientists interested in more basic questions about the brain, it was downright fascinating.

In Hideo Yamamoto’s manga series “Homunculus,” this untapped cerebral potential is unleashed through a method based on even shakier science: the skull-perforating technique known as trepanning.