Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of the primary sensory cortex for the detection, discrimination and awareness of visual stimuli, but it is unknown how neuronal

Somatosensation is a complex sense mediated by more than a dozen distinct neural subtypes in the periphery. Although pressure and touch sensation have been mapped to primary somatosensory cortex in rodents, it has been controversial whether pain and temperature inputs are also directed to this area. Here we use a well-defined somatosensory modality, cool sensation mediated by peripheral TrpM8-r...

Absence seizures consist of bilateral spike-and-wave discharges (SWDs) occurring over widespread cortical and thalamic regions. In genetic models of absence epilepsy, recent in vivo investigations indicate that SWDs emerge first in the facial somatosensory cortex and then propagate via the corticothalamocortical loop. The specific involvement of this cortical region in ictogenic processes remai...

Animal experiments suggest that cortical sensory representations may be remodelled as a consequence of changing synaptic efficacy by timing-dependent associative neuronal activity. Here we describe a timing-based associative form of plasticity in human somatosensory cortex. Paired associative stimulation (PAS) was performed by combining repetitive median nerve stimulation with transcranial magn...

Long-range corticocortical communication may have important roles in context-dependent sensory processing, yet we know very little about how these pathways influence their target regions. We studied the influence of primary motor cortex activity on primary somatosensory cortex in the mouse whisker system. We show that primary motor and somatosensory cortices undergo coherent, context-dependent ...

Over 150 years ago, E.H. Weber declared that experience showed that tactile acuity was not affected by viewing the stimulated body part. However, more recent investigations suggest that cross-modal links do exist between the senses. Viewing the stimulated body site improves performance on tactile discrimination and detection tasks and enhances tactile acuity. Here, we show that vision modulates...

Studies of human emotion perception have linked a distributed set of brain regions to the recognition of emotion in facial, vocal, and body expressions. In particular, lesions to somatosensory cortex in the right hemisphere have been shown to impair recognition of facial and vocal expressions of emotion. Although these findings suggest that somatosensory cortex represents body states associated...