Fig. 12.

Hot spot model of neural plasticity. A depiction of our identified focal zone or hot spot of reorganization in the thalamus. It is proposed that hot spots exist at other levels of the somatosensory pathway such as the cortex. Cortically, the hot spot is a slice oriented orthogonally to the cortical columns of Mountcastle (1957), in the same way the thalamic hot spot is orthogonally oriented with respect to the thalamic rods of Jones et al. (1979, 1982) andJones and Friedman (1982). The somatotopy of the thalamus is rotated compared with that of the cortex, given the difference in the orientation of thalamic rods and cortical columns. See Discussion.