Dr. Poppy Crum

And so he mapped that part of their cortex, and then that's how we ended up with the homunculus.

And you'll see, you know, it'll have bigger lips.

It'll have, you know, smaller parts of your back and the areas where you just don't have the same sensitivities.

Well, fast forward to today.

When you look at that homunculus, one of the things I always will ask people to think about is, you know, what's wrong with this image?

You know, this is an image from 1940 that is still in every textbook.

And any Stanford student will look at it and they'll immediately say, well, the thumb should be bigger because we do this all day long.

And I've got more sensitivity in my fingers because I'm always typing on my mobile device, which is absolutely true.

Or maybe they'll say something like, well, the ankles are the same size and we drive cars now a lot more than we did in the 40s.

Or maybe if I live in a different part of the world, I drive on one side versus the other.

And in a few years, we probably won't be driving and those resources get optimized elsewhere.

So what the homunculus is, is it's a representation of how our brain has allocated resources to help us be successful.

And those resources are the limited cells we have that support whatever we need to flourish in our world.

And the beauty of that is when you develop expertise, you develop more support, more resources go to helping you do that thing.

But they also get more specific.

They develop more specificity so that, you know, I might have suddenly a lot more cells in my brain devoted to helping me.

You know, I'm a violinist and my—

well, my left hand, my right hemisphere, my somatosensory cortex, I'm going to have a lot more cells that are helping me feel my fingers and the tips of everything so that I can be fluid and more virtuosic.

But that means I have more cells, but they're more specified.

They're giving me more sensitivity.