Rolf Degen has an interesting post on the question of how much of the brain is devoted to processing touch stimuli from the penis.
The Fake Homunculus: A new book about sex depicts a beefed-up representation of the penis in the human brain Everybody has once already seen a picture of the Sensory Homunculus - a humanized image of the relative amount of cerebral cortex space devoted to processing the tactile input from the different body parts. It appears grotesquely disfigured, because some parts like the lips or the hands commandeer disproportionately much cortical capacity.
But, Degen says, a new book claims that bashful scientists suppressed the truth about the enormity of the penis area of the cortex.
In her book Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, British science writer Zoe Cormier tells the tale of how "imaginative scientists in the 1950s produced a spectacularly ugly model of the human ...
