homunculus

In my first neuroscience course at Columbia University, I learned about the homunculus.

Later three-dimensional representations of the homunculus depict it as a grotesque, hairless goblin with enormous lips, hands and feet.

As a student and later as a practitioner in the field, I had accepted the homunculus as unquestioned fact.

The problem started when I was trying to decide how much to trust a new method for cleaning up imaging data and had asked to conduct what I thought was a routine test of its validity by checking the connections in the area of the homunculus that corresponded to the hand.

We went on to reexamine our own prior work, pulled in all potentially relevant data sets we could get our hands on, conducted new experiments and reexamined the published evidence for and against the homunculus story, going back to the early 1900s.