Monday, June 24, 2013

Whose monkey's uncle left?

Whose unculus?

"The resulting image is a grotesquely disfigured human with disproportionately huge hands, lips, and face in comparison to the rest of the body. Because of the fine motor skills and sense nerves found in these particular parts of the body, they are represented as being larger on the homunculus. A part of the body with fewer sensory and/or motor connections to the brain is represented to appear smaller."

 Monkey face

"More recently, the neocortical distribution of activity-dependent gene expression in marmosets provided direct evidence that the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which comprises Broca's area in humans and has been associated with auditory processing of species-specific vocalizations and orofacial control in macaques, is engaged during vocal output in a New World monkey.[22][23] These findings putatively set the origin of vocalization-related neocortical circuits to at least 35 million years ago, when the Old and New World monkey lineages split."

My ororfacial control does not feel to be the same on the left as the right. I do not think that I differentiate the left side of my face from the right in my normal use. The same with my tongue. I do not differentiate the left motor control from the right, not that it is impossible. My habitual use comes from my interactions with others both reading and expressing the muscular control. The left side of other people's faces did not register in my consciousness. A blind spot that I did not know existed. 

No comments:

Post a Comment