Saturday, May 14, 2005

So what we need is a new homunculus.

Over at Laputan Logic, John leads off a post about the idea of a "homunculus" with two images that seem to me to be directly relevant to the situation Little Quinn has faced since his birth. The images are of two human figures, with the features distorted to depict what our bodies would look like if our body parts grew in strict proportion to the amount of brain volume devoted to sensory perception and movement of those parts. The gigantic hands are obvious, but what strikes me is the warped mouth and elongated nose. That's a surprising graphical illustration of what we've come to discover in the course of feeding Little Quinn.

I also notice that for all the jokes out there about the organ with which men do most of their actual thinking, that particular organ seems to be almost an afterthought to the brain in terms of area devoted to its functioning.

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