homunculus

homunculus, diminutive fully formed human body, historically believed to inhabit a germ cell (an egg or a sperm) and to have the capacity to increase in size, giving rise to an adult human. The word homunculus is Latin for “little man” or “little person.”

The homunculus has had a colourful history in Arab-Islamic and European cultures. In medieval and early modern times, the term was commonly used to refer to an artificial humanlike being that people thought could be created through alchemy. In early modern scholarly texts, however, a homunculus was depicted by natural philosophers as a tiny person contained within an individual sperm. This depiction was used as a way of explaining human development in the womb.

In the modern era, the word homunculus has referred as well to a distorted-looking image of a person in which the hands, face, lips, and tongue are enlarged to reflect the relative size of the areas of the brain’s motor cortex and sensory cortex that were thought to be devoted to each of those body parts. That and other motor and sensory homunculi, often referred to as cortical homunculi, became iconic images almost as soon as they appeared in the medical literature, even though they did not accurately represent how the regions of the brain and the rest of the body interact.

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Origins of cortical homunculi

The modern concept of the cortical homunculi emerged in 1937, when one such homunculus was presented in the journal Brain in an article written by neurologists Wilder Penfield and Edwin Boldrey. The two men had gathered data from 126 surgical patients who had been given only local anesthesia for their operations. When Penfield electrically stimulated different areas of the patients’ cerebral cortex during the operations, the patients were able to tell him where in their bodies they experienced feeling or movement.

Penfield and Boldrey mapped the sensory and motor data, associating it with areas of the motor cortex and sensory cortex. They then converted their data into rough visual images to show how the brain perceives body parts. According to their depictions, roughly one-third of the motor and sensory cortical areas was dedicated to the hands. Another third was associated with the face, lips, tongue, and pharynx. The remaining third was devoted to the rest of the body—the trunk, legs, and arms. The results of Penfield and Boldrey’s work suggested that the brain “sees” the human body very differently from the way the body appears physically.

Penfield and Boldrey’s cortical homunculus quickly captured the imagination of other individuals in the medical profession and the general public. Eventually, artists modeled the original image as two separate three-dimensional homunculi—one related to the sensory cortex and the other to the motor cortex. There were slight differences between the two figures; for instance, the motor homunculus had a larger face and hands than the sensory homunculus had.

Limitations and importance of modern models

Although dramatic figures of cortical homunculi have been reproduced in various textbooks, encyclopedias, and medical texts as illustrations of cortical mapping, they oversimplify how the body’s sensorimotor signals are actually processed in the brain. The homunculi drawings and models suggest that there is a clear-cut, orderly separation between the sensory cortex and the motor cortex, but there is no such separation. The oversimplification reflected in the homunculi was due to the challenge of converting the original data points into images. To make that conversion, much of the information indicating functional overlap between the two regions of the cortex had to be sacrificed. There was no clear way to show such interconnectedness in a diagram or a sculpture. Paradoxically, the two separate homunculi helped create and perpetuate the misconception that the two cortical areas function separately.

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In actuality, the brain processes signals from both cortices to operate the body. For example, in order to manipulate the hands, the brain receives sensory data—including touch, temperature, and spatial information—from the hands and then generates motor signals to move the muscles in the palms and fingers. The large network of sensorimotor pathways devoted to the hands gives humans the ability to make a vast range of movements, from gripping a hammer to playing a violin to performing a delicate surgical operation.

Despite their shortcomings, the modern homunculi are valid in showing that the extent of the cortical areas dedicated to each body part depends not on the part’s size but on the amount of information communicated between that part and the brain. The data show that the brain sends, receives, and processes far more information involving the hands, feet, face, lips, and tongue than information involving any other body parts.