The concept of a modular organisation of the spinal withdrawal reflex circuits has proven to be fundamental for the understanding of how the spinal cord is organised and how the sensorimotor circuits translate sensory information into adequate movement corrections. Through cross modality learning dependent mechanisms a task related body representation is engraved at the network level involving an active probing procedure termed ‘somatosensory imprinting’ during development. Somatosensory imprinting depends on the tactile input that is associated with spontaneous movements that occur during sleep and results in elimination of erroneous connections and establishment of correct connections. Spontaneous movements are primarily generated in the central nervous system as they still occur after complete dorsal rhizotomy. Recently we found that a task related body representation closely related to motor patterns emerges from a transitory floating and plastic organization through profound activity dependent rewiring, involving both sprouting and elimination of afferent connections. In this NMDA dependent process, tactile fibres appear to guide nociceptive afferents to appropriate targets in the spinal cord, resulting in a topographical alignment of different sensory modalities in the dorsal horn. Given that spontaneous movements are a ubiquitous phenomenon during embryonic development in all vertebrates, somatosensory imprinting may be a general strategy employed by the nervous system during developmental self-organisation.