Penfield’s Homunculus and Other Grotesque Creatures from the Land of If
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The neurosurgeon Wilder Graves Penfield (1891-1976) helped to develop a surgical treatment for epilepsy and used his results to investigate the functional organization of the brain. He was instrumental in founding the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University, which he directed from 1934 to 1960. There he studied, with his collaborators, the effects of stimulation and surgical ablation on different parts of the brain in order to localize their somatosensory functions. To visualize the results of this research, Hortense Pauline Cantlie drew images of a homunculus whose proportions reflected the extent of the cortical areas controlling different parts of the body. These images were published by Penfield in 1937; a modified version followed in 1950, opening the way for such developments as the diagrams of mammalian brains drawn by the neurophysiologist Clinton N. Woolsey in 1958. This article will reconstruct the history of Penfield's map of the human brain, which was utilized in medical texts for many decades, but which eventually would be severely criticized.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".