So Welker introduced a method. One of his big interests was what causes fissures to form in the brain, and he has the best review of that that has ever been done – all the issues and all the research and why they form –even though it’s a bit old now. But what he’s known for – he and his co-worker that came to work with him, Jack Johnson, was first demonstrating how cortex in raccoons was organized, but was also highly specialized, and this relates directly to Ford Ebner’s study and why it was important to look at raccoons.
This little bit of cortex that is huge right here represents the hand but also represents it in a fine grain manner that no one suspected before – so you have digit 1, digit 2, digit 3, digit 4, digit 5 – it has a palm, all there. And at the same time, Wally looked at the behavior of raccoons – and you can cover up their eyes so they can’t see, and give them a big dish of water and throw something in the water and they’ll have their hands in the water, and they will immediately pick up the food object.
So they use the vibrations in the water, and their two hands and they can tell where something is – they can locate something in space by the disparity of the two waves hitting the two hands – amazing ability. So, highly specialized, very important hand cortex for a raccoon. And this is part of a tradition that’s gone on ever since then – Ken Catania has star-nosed moles and so on - look at specialized animals, see what they can do, see what you can learn about general principles from them.