(Nature) – Study challenges the textbook idea that the brain region that processes body sensations reorganizes itself after limb amputation.

A brain-imaging study of people with amputated arms has upended a long-standing belief: that the brain’s map of the body reorganizes itself to compensate for missing body parts.

Previous research had suggested that neurons in the brain region holding this internal map, called the primary somatosensory cortex, would grow into the neighbouring area of the cortex that previously sensed the limb.

But the latest findings, published in Nature Neuroscience on 21 August reveal that the primary somatosensory cortex stays remarkably constant even years after arm amputation. (Read More)