It is already more than a century since FRITSCH and HITZIG [32] discovered the motor cortex in the dog. The discovery was so sensational that a vast number of experiments were carried out to further elucidate cortical motor function during the following years. In the beginning the effort was focused on delineating the localization of motor function within the motor cortex. Little attention was paid to the sensory input to the motor cortex because suitable techniques for studying it were lacking. With the progress and development of electrophysiological technique, MARSHALL et al.[53] succeeded in demonstrating evoked potentials in the monkey sensory cortex in response to tactile stimulation. Shortly following this report, ADRIAN and MoRuzzi [1] observed increase of impulses in the medullary pyramid in response to sensory stimulation in lightly anesthetized cats. The latter result suggested that sensory impulses which arrived at the motor cortex could have activated pyramidal tract cells although there was still a possibility that these PT cells were located in the sensory cortex. Several decades later, aided by the newly developed closed chamber method, MOUNTCASTLE [55] examined the details of sensory input to the somatic sensory cortex in unanesthetized cats. He found that each neuron receives precise epicritic information arising from a particular part of the body. Shortly after that discovery, BUSER and IMBERT [22] and BROOKS et al. [21] reported similar results in the cat motor cortex.
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Asanuma et al. (1989) studied this question.