The Sensory Hand

“What is so special about primate hands? Few, if any, are more qualified to answer this question than Vernon Mountcastle. He and his colleagues have been the leading students of somatic sensibility (‘somesthesis’) in primates for over half a century. In The Sensory Hand, he offers an overview of a lifetime of influential, and sometimes controversial, research. The massive treatise begins with a review of the evolution and structure of the human hand. Mountcastle then ventures forth on a journey from manual behavior to tactile receptors all the way to the cerebral cortex. Through sixteen lengthy chapters, he reviews each level of the somatosensory pathway in rich detail… Mountcastle does a masterful job integrating the basics of what we know about how sensory information travels from the hand to the highest regions of the brain. Although there are a few excellent books on the evolution of the hands and how we use them, this is the only sophisticated book on the neural basis of how the hand works.”—Charles G. Gross and Asif A. Ghazanfar, Science

“This volume will certainly become a definitive reference on the mechanisms of sensory processing in the hand… [It] will be essential for experts on the hand or somatosensory processing, an interesting read for scientists focused on sensation more generally, and a useful reference for graduate and undergraduate students early in their career.”—David J. Pinto, Quarterly Review of Biology