305-Topographic Body Maps Tiling Human Visual Cortex

Paper Talk · Dec 9, 2025 · 13m

This paper introduces a computational model to investigate how the brain bridges visual input and the sense of touch, or somatosensation, focusing on the mechanism behind vicarious sensory experiences. Utilizing this model on fMRI data, the authors first confirmed the existence of intrinsic, organized somatotopic maps representing body-part tuning across the known somatosensory network during rest. A major finding was that this somatotopic organization expanded profoundly into the dorsolateral visual cortex during video viewing, demonstrating that visual input alone recruits spatially…