Oct 17, 2021 2 min read Deep Life

The Little Person in your Brain

A quick read to introduce you to your homunculus, the map of your body in your brain. And to show you how it changes.

The human brain is fascinating.

Let’s try to understand a bit of it today. See this image attached below?

THIS IS YOU.

All of us have a little person in our brain. It’s formed as our bodies recognise and interpret data from our touch sensors, transforming them into feelings of different sensations. Some senses are more sensitive than others, and everywhere with high-density information is over-represented.

What you get is a weird looking map of our body: a homunculus. It has large fingers, lips, tongue and genitals. Pretty standard.

Thanks to this ‘little person’, we are able to enjoy life by experiencing different sensations.

Recent research shows that this map changes over time. By limiting certain sensory areas, others heighten, transforming this little person.

Wear a blindfold for an hour and watch your touch, taste and smell heighten - your brain adjusts to reflect that change and your little person changes. Just like that.

It is proof that (almost) everything is changeable - even things we normally think are fixed. Empathy, emotional range, memory, attention, IQ, to name a few.

Isn't that fascinating?