Cortical homunculus

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, and/ 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.