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somatosensory cortex

or primary somesthetic area / primary somatic sensory area. It is located in the parietal lobe, and deals with information from the various "touch" receptors, such as temperature, pressure, limb position, movement, pain, etc. It has been implicated in the processes by which memories (or some type of them) are consolidated during sleep.

Somatosensory Cortex

Parietal Lobe

Inferior Parietal Lobule

Intraparietal Sulcus

Fronto-parietal Network

Posterior Parietal Cortex

Precuneus

Somatosensory Cortex

Superior Parietal Cortex

 

Older news items (pre-2010) brought over from the old website

November 2005

What we perceive is not what we sense

Perceiving a simple touch may depend as much on memory, attention, and expectation as on the stimulus itself. A study involving macaque monkeys has found that the monkeys’ perception of a touch (varied in intensity) was more closely correlated with activity in the medial premotor cortex (MPC), a region of the brain's frontal lobe known to be involved in making decisions about sensory information, than activity in the primary somatosensory cortex (which nevertheless accurately recorded the intensity of the sensation). MPC neurons began to fire before the stimulus even touched the monkeys' fingertips — presumably because the monkey was expecting the stimulus.

Lafuente, V. & Romo, R. 2005. Neuronal correlates of subjective sensory experience. Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1698-1703.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-11/hhmi-tsi110405.php

February 2003

Another step in understanding how memories are formed

The electrical activity of individual neurons in the brains of two adult rhesus monkeys was monitored while the monkeys played a memory-based video game in which an image pops up on the computer screen with four targets—white dots—superimposed on it. The monkeys’ task was to learn which target on which image was associated with a reward (a drop of their favorite fruit juice). Dramatic changes in the activity of some hippocampal neurons, which the scientists called "changing cells", paralleled their learning, indicating that these neurons are involved in the initial formation of new associative memories. In some of the cells, activity continued after the animal had learned the association, suggesting that these cells may participate in the eventual storage of the associations in long-term memory.

Wirth, S., Yanike, M., Frank, L.M., Smith, A.C., Brown, E.N. & Suzuki, W.A. 2003. Single Neurons in the Monkey Hippocampus and Learning of New Associations. Science, 300, 1578-1581.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-06/nyu-fir060503.php
http://tinyurl.com/ftob

Mindfulness meditation changes how decisions are made

The study involved 26 experienced Buddhist meditators and 40 control subjects. Scans of their brains while they played the "ultimatum game," in which the first player proposes how to divide a sum of money and the second can accept or reject the proposal, revealed that the two groups engaged different parts of the brain when making these decisions.

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