Note 163 — Chapter XX

Maybe the localization of intracranial pain is itself due to such association as this of local signs with each other, rather than to their qualitative similarity in neighboring parts (supra, p. 19); though it is conceivable that association and similarity itself should here have one and the same neural basis. If we suppose the sensory nerves from those parts of the body beneath any patch of skin to terminate in the same sensorial brain-tract as those from the skin itself, and if the excitement of any one fibre tends to irradiate through the whole of that tract, the feelings of all fibres going to that tract would presumably both have a similar intrinsic quality, and at the same time tend each to arouse the other. Since the same nerve-trunk in most cases supplies the skin and the parts beneath, the anatomical hypothesis presents nothing improbable.