Foot Painters' Toes Mapped Like Fingers in the Brain / Le dita dei piedi dei pittori mappate come le dita nel cervello Segnalato dal Dott. Giuseppe Cotellessa / Reported by Dr. Giuseppe Cotellessa Using your feet like hands can cause organised ‘hand-like’ maps of the toes in the brain, never before in people, finds a new UCL-led study of two professional foot painters. These findings, published in Cell Reports, demonstrate an extreme example of how the human body map can change in response to experience. “For almost all people, each of our fingers is represented by its own little section of the brain, while there’s no distinction between brain areas for each of our toes,” said the study’s lead author, PhD student Daan Wesselink (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and University of Oxford). “But in other non-human primate species, who regularly use their toes for dextrous tasks like climbing, both the toes and fingers are specifically represented
