Phantom limb pain (PLP) in amputees is associated with reorganizational changes in the somatosensory system. To investigate the relationship between somatosensory and motor reorganization and phantom limb pain, we used focal transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the motor cortex and neuroelectric source imaging of the somatosensory cortex (SI) in patients with and without phantom limb pain...

Eye position helps locate visual targets relative to one's own body and modulates the distribution of attention in visual space. Whereas in the monkey, proprioceptive eye position signals have been recorded in the somatosensory cortex, in humans, no brain site has yet been associated with eye position. We aimed to disrupt the proprioceptive representation of the right eye in the left somatosens...

OBJECTIVE The study aims to investigate whether there is a higher excitability in the deep cortical layers of the peri-oral region of the somatosensory cortex as compared to other cortical regions in absence epileptic WAG/Rij rats and whether this is unique for this type of epileptic rats, as would be predicted by the cortical focus theory of absence epilepsy. METHODS Excitability of cortical...

Recent evidence suggests that neurons in primary sensory cortex arrange into competitive groups, representing stimuli by their joint activity rather than as independent feature analysers. A possible explanation for these results is that sensory cortex implements attractor dynamics, although this proposal remains controversial. Here we report that fast attractor dynamics emerge naturally in a co...

The thalamus is the main sensory input to the cerebral cortex, not only for auditory stimuli, but also for visual and somatosensory stimuli (Alitto and Usrey, 2003). On the other hand, approximately half of the neuron input to the dorsal thalamus come from the cortex. These corticothalamic feedback connections seem to be important for sensory processing in the visual, auditory and somatosensory...

Computational analyses have begun to elucidate which components of somatosensory cortical population activity may encode basic stimulus features. Recent results from rat barrel cortex suggest that the essence of this code is not synergistic spike patterns, but rather the precise timing of single neuron's first post-stimulus spikes. This may form the basis for a fast, robust population code.