somatosensory cortex tagged posts

Chronic pain is the leading cause of disability in the world.
Credit: © Kittiphan / Fotolia

For the first time, researchers at the UNC School of Medicine showed they could target one brain region with a weak alternating current of electricity, enhance the naturally occurring brain rhythms of that region, and significantly decrease symptoms associated with chronic lower back pain.

The results, published in the Journal of Pain and presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference in San Diego this week, suggest that doctors could one day target parts of the brain with new noninvasive treatment strategies, such as transcranial alternating current stimulation, or tACS, which researchers used in this study to boost the naturally occurring brain waves they theorized were important for the tre...

fMRI is used to highlight select implant sites in the somatosensory cortex. Electrodes implanted in this region were able to stimulate neurons that produced physical sensations, like a squeeze or tap, in the arm of a paralyzed man. Credit: Courtesy of the Andersen lab

For the first time, scientists at Caltech have induced natural sensations in the arm of a paralyzed man by stimulating a certain region of the brain with a tiny array of electrodes. The patient has a high-level spinal cord lesion and, besides not being able to move his limbs, also cannot feel them. The work could one day allow paralyzed people using prosthetic limbs to feel physical feedback from sensors placed on these devices.

The research was done in the laboratory of Richard Andersen, James G...

Non-gray circles and their connections represent 80, 70 and 60 percent (from top to bottom) of all outgoing traffic within the sampled section of a cortical region. Credit: Indiana University

70% of all info within cortical regions in the brain passes through only 20% of its regions’ neurons. These high-traffic “hub neurons” could play a role in understanding brain health since this sort of highly efficient network – in which a small number of neurons are more essential to brain function – is also more vulnerable to disruption. That’s because relatively small breakages can cause the whole system to “go down”...