Welcome.

So…..what is a homunculus? The best way I can think to describe it is as a population map for the brain.

The information headed towards the brain is full of sensory data (like touch) and the info heading away from the brain carries instructions (often to muscles). At some point, scientists realized that the number of connections to/from somewhere in the body isn’t related to the size of that location. Some more important sensory areas like the lips or the hands have a disproportionate number of neuronal connections relative to its size.

A cortical homunculus. 

And this is where a homunculus becomes useful. It’s a visual representation of the relative number of sensory/motor connections that exists in different parts of the body. It’s an extraordinary consolidation, converting tons of data about complicated neuronal pathways into one artistic image. An abstract medical concept made easy to visualize, conceptualize and understand.

And that’s our goal with this blog. We want to be like a homunculus, taking convoluted information about health and medicine and transforming it into something simple and hopefully, understandable.

We want our blog posts to be discussions not lectures (we get enough of those anyways) so we welcome your suggestions and comments.

Hope you enjoy and thanks for reading,

Mansi and Sophia