Hand Function and the Neocortex

To watch a curious young macaque explore and manipulate his immediate surroundings must surely delight and amaze us all. The monkey selects a particular objectfor scrutiny, reaches out and grasps it, handles it delicately with the fingers or more forcibly with the hand, scans the various surfaces with the fin­ ger pads, and finally identifies it. If we compare this monkey's adroitness and discriminative capacities with our own, at once we have a concise statement of important biological sim...