Visual cortex: Looking into a Klein bottle

The English neurologist Hughlings Jackson inferred the presence of a topographic map of the body musculature in the cerebral cortex more than a century ago, from his observations of the orderly progressions of seizure activity across the body during epilepsy. Topographic maps of one kind or another are now known to be a ubiquitous feature of cortical organization, at least in the primary sensory and motor areas. Every medical student learns that there is a distorted map of the body surface in somatosensory cortex, known as the ‘homunculus’, and that in the visual cortex there is an orderly map of visual space.