Pictures of the redistributed nervous system?

February 2, 2006 8:02 PM

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?

posted by rebirtha to science & nature (6 comments total)

Oddly enough, I think the term you want to search for is homunculus. Combined with "sensory" or "motor," generally.

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 has favorites]

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

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

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

Did you ask gaspode? She deals with rat brains for a living.
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