He mapped a monkey’s hand map in the brain. Then he amputated the monkey’s middle finger. After a number of months he remapped the monkey and found that the brain map for the amputated finger had disappeared and that the maps for the adjacent fingers had grown into the space that had originally mapped for the middle finger. Here was the clearest possible demonstration that brain maps are dynamic, that there is a competition for cortical real estate, and that brain resources are allocated according to the principle of use it or lose it.
