Pictures of the redistributed nervous system?
February 2, 2006 8:02 PM Subscribe
Can anyone help me find the pictures I once saw of remapped nervous system density in rats and humans?
Actually, there were a bunch of different pictures. I saw this in a biology book once in school and there's no way I can trace my steps back to it. The key characteristic of the pictures was that the nerves, normally not equally distributed, are redistributed to be equal. The effect is that the bodies are distorted so that the area containing the dense areas of nerves becomes larger and the less dense, smaller. The rat sticks out in my head as having an especially large nose. Uh.... Pointers?
Actually, there were a bunch of different pictures. I saw this in a biology book once in school and there's no way I can trace my steps back to it. The key characteristic of the pictures was that the nerves, normally not equally distributed, are redistributed to be equal. The effect is that the bodies are distorted so that the area containing the dense areas of nerves becomes larger and the less dense, smaller. The rat sticks out in my head as having an especially large nose. Uh.... Pointers?
Side note: the homunculi don't show nerve density in the skin; they show the relative amount of cerebral cortex devoted to processing data from/to that part of the body.
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:00 PM on February 2, 2006
posted by ikkyu2 at 10:00 PM on February 2, 2006
Although, would they be showing nerve density, they would probably look very much the same.
posted by cerbous at 1:18 AM on February 3, 2006
posted by cerbous at 1:18 AM on February 3, 2006
Response by poster: Yeah, I checked those out (as listed above by staggernation.) There were definitely more pictures than those of the human, but they all could conceivably have been discussing the cortex thing instead. Man, I really want to find that rat picture.
posted by rebirtha at 6:51 AM on February 3, 2006
posted by rebirtha at 6:51 AM on February 3, 2006
Did you ask gaspode? She deals with rat brains for a living.
posted by matildaben at 9:05 AM on February 3, 2006
posted by matildaben at 9:05 AM on February 3, 2006
You're looking for a rat sensory homonculus, but I don't have any luck finding the rat version either (at least not online).
Going from the text in this page, I think Kandel's text will have the figure you're looking for. It's in most academic libraries.
Kandel, E.R., Schwartz, J.H. and Jessell, T.M. (1991). Principles of Neural Science. 3rd Edition. New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Company. Inc.
posted by metaculpa at 5:01 PM on February 12, 2006
Going from the text in this page, I think Kandel's text will have the figure you're looking for. It's in most academic libraries.
Kandel, E.R., Schwartz, J.H. and Jessell, T.M. (1991). Principles of Neural Science. 3rd Edition. New York: Elsevier Science Publishing Company. Inc.
posted by metaculpa at 5:01 PM on February 12, 2006
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I don't know about rats, but the human ones can get sort of creepy.
posted by staggernation at 8:08 PM on February 2, 2006 [1 favorite]