Our movements may be controlled by two distinct networks in our brain, rather than just one. For nearly a century, we have known that the motor cortex – a relatively thin strip of tissue in the centre of the brain that runs across both hemispheres – controls our body movements. In the 1930s, neuroscientists Wilder Penfield and Edwin Boldrey electrically stimulated the brains of people undergoing brain surgery, showing that different parts of the primary motor cortex control different parts of the body. They also found that these control areas are arranged in the same order as the body parts they direct, with the toes at one end and the face at the other, as depicted by the so-called homunculus map. Evan Gordon at Washington University School of Medicine in Missouri and his colleagues wanted to use modern technology to look into the Penfield-Boldrey idea in more detail.