Human cortical processing of gentle touch: what can we learn from EEG, MEG and SEEG?

My research focuses on the human sense of touch, from the signalling of receptors in the skin to brain mechanisms for processing of tactile information. We record the activity of single mechanoreceptive fibres (e.g. C-tactile (CT) afferents) using microneurography and study brain mechanisms using brain imaging (fMRI, EEG, SEEG, MEG). We aim to improve our understanding of the sense of touch by establishing the link between the neural messages provided by the peripheral sensory receptors and discriminative and emotional aspects of sensory perception. The focus of my talk will be on how the brain processes gentle touch, which is implicated in person-to-person interactions and conspecific bonding.

Visceral inputs, brain dynamics and first-person perspective.

The dominant paradigm in cognitive neuroscience is of an agent collecting information from the external environment via the senses, and reacting by producing actions. Here, I will present a revision of this paradigm that includes the interplay between the brain and the internal bodily environment, and more specifically, the heart and gastro-intestinal (GI) tract. Both the heart and GI tract intrinsically generate their own oscillatory electrical activity, even when disconnected from the brain, from the first weeks of gestation until death. Ascending cardiac and GI tract signals reach numerous subcortical and cortical targets. We recently showed that cardiac and GI tract signals directly contribute to the organization of spontaneous brain activity, using fMRI, MEG, iEEG and MUA data recorded in humans. I will also propose and discuss the hypothesis that the neural monitoring of cardiac and GI inputs plays a key role in the generation of first-person perspective, or the unique bodily-centered viewpoint that we have on the environment, by creating a subject-centered coordinate system involved in subjective perception and decision as well as in spontaneous cognition.