Barrels, stripes, and fingerprints in the brain - implications for theories of cortical organization

In the last decade improvements in the histological processing of cortical tissue in conjunction with the investigation of additional mammalian species in comparative brain studies has expanded the information available to guide theories of cortical organization. Here I review some of these recent findings in the somatosensory system with an emphasis on modules related to specializations of the peripheral sensory surface. The diversity of modular representations, or cortical "isomorphs" suggest that information from the sensory sheet guides many of the features of cortical maps and suggest that cortex is not constrained to form circular units in the form of a traditional cortical column.