eftychia: Me in kilt and poofy shirt, facing away, playing acoustic guitar behind head (Default)
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posted by [personal profile] eftychia at 01:53am on 2003-11-17

I'll try to get around to answering recent comments later. For now I'm still in babble-mode.

Something I was thinking about a week or two ago and forgot to mention here: I would be very interested in a picture of a cat, colour-coded to show the relative density of nerve endings in different areas of the cat's skin. (A black-and-white drawing with different shading counts as "colour-coded" for this idea.) I've got a couple of questions that such a picture might answer, and even if it doesn't, it'd be a really interesting picture. I wonder whether it's already been done (and is available some place less expensive than an advanced veterinary-school textbook). It would actually have to be an intricate pose or more than one drawing, because I want to be able to compare the top of a foot to the pads, for example.

Someone I mentioned this to said they'd seen a diagram of a cat with body parts enlarged or reduced to convey similar information, but from their description it sounded like the illusrations I've seen of "brain maps" which show something else (which may be correlated to some degree, but is, IIRC, a different question to start with).

Okay, sleep now; dizzy again.

There are 4 comments on this entry. (Reply.)
 
posted by [identity profile] juuro.livejournal.com at 06:42am on 2003-11-17
There have been "parts enlarged/reduced" diagrams done to reflect the proportion of cortex dedicated to each area. There have been similar diagrams done to reflect the density of sensory neurons in each area. You never know until you look. And, unfortunately, sometimes the accompanying text is so muddled that it is difficult to work out what was intended.
 
posted by [identity profile] aliza250.livejournal.com at 09:01am on 2003-11-17
"brain maps" which show something else

They show how much of the brain is devoted to the body part in question - combining both sensory and motor processing. I'd imagine that both ears and nose would be a lot bigger, in such a map of a cat, than their relative size in humans.

And it would completely obscure the fact that, while a kitty nose is a sensitive organ of smell, the the skin at the tip of the nose is also quite a sensitive organ of touch.
 
posted by [identity profile] weskeag.livejournal.com at 08:53pm on 2003-11-18
Why cats like getting stroked on the nose so much--I've been able to make cats relax so much that way that they fall asleep.
 
posted by [identity profile] src.livejournal.com at 01:22am on 2003-11-19

There is a large quasi-coffeetable sized book, in hard & soft cover, called "The Book of the Cat" that has a cat version of the Sensory Homunculus.

I'm not 100% sure that this link goes to the right book-- the one I want has a white cover, with a big orange cat (photorealistic painting) on it walking towards the viewer.

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