The organization of the motor cortex has been studied and debated for more than 130 years. Although it contains a map of the body, the map is overlapping and fractured and therefore additional principles of organization may be needed to explain the topography. Recently, a growing body of evidence suggests one such principle. The motor cortex appears to be partly organized as a map of complex, behaviorally useful actions that compose the animal’s movement repertoire. In the action-map perspective, the statistical complexity of the movement repertoire leads to the complexity of the cortical map.