What's with the brain controlling head,arm,leg in an upside down way?

[sameeralord]

Hello everyone,

Ok in the cerebralcortex I saw a pic where there is upside down HAL, the brain controls head,arm, leg upside down. Now I don't know much about this area. I know there is only motor cortex, so are these areas referring to axons that are coming out of motor cortex and supplying these correspondinga areas. Thanks

 

[ebits21]

It means that if you move your leg, for example, that a particular area of the motor cortex will be active. Of those neurons that are active, a certain number of them will connect to other neurons (or many other neurons) that eventually exit the brain as a nerve bundle of axons that control the leg.

It's not that the axons directly leave the motor cortex and connect to the leg directly, just that they control the pathway that leads to the leg's control.

As for being upside down, the brain is just a processor of information, there's really no way to say which is the correct vertical orientation to process information in. The representations of the bodies control in the brain are distorted, "upside down", switched left/right etc. This is because of complex evolutionary reasons (yet another reason creationism is ridiculous).