{"id":319202,"date":"2021-08-09T14:45:22","date_gmt":"2021-08-09T11:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/neurons-that-respond-to-touch-are-less-picky-than-expected\/"},"modified":"2021-08-09T14:45:22","modified_gmt":"2021-08-09T11:45:22","slug":"neurons-that-respond-to-touch-are-less-picky-than-expected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/neurons-that-respond-to-touch-are-less-picky-than-expected\/","title":{"rendered":"#Neurons that respond to touch are less picky than expected"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Neurons that respond to touch are less picky than expected<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

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Researchers used to believe that individual primary touch-sensitive neatly responded to specific types of touch. Now a Northwestern University study finds that touch-sensitive neurons communicate touch in a much messier and jumbled manner.\n <\/p>\n

In the study, the team developed a new technique to stimulate rats’ whiskers in three dimensions while simultaneously recording first-stage touch-sensitive neurons in the rats’ brains. The researchers discovered that, instead of responding to distinct types of touch, these neurons\u2014which are the first to receive early touch signals\u2014responded to many types of touch and to varying degrees. <\/p>\n

The research was published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science<\/a>s<\/i>.<\/p>\n

“Many people used to think that each neuron was very precisely tuned for some aspect of the touch stimulus,” said Northwestern’s Mitra Hartmann, one of the study’s senior authors. “We didn’t find that at all. Some neurons respond more than others to some features of the stimulus, so there is some degree of tuning. But these neurons respond to many combinations of different forces and torques app<\/a>lied to the whisker.”<\/p>\n

“When we compared all the recorded neurons, we found that the stimuli they responded to overlapped with each other but not perfectly,” added Nicholas Bush, the paper’s first author. “It’s similar to a painter’s palette: We expected to find a handful of ‘primary colors,” where a neuron could be one of a few different types. But we found the ‘palette’ had already been mixed. Each neuron was a little different from all the others, but together they covered an entire spectrum.”<\/p>\n

Hartmann is a professor of biomedical and mechanical engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering, where she is a member of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems. A former Ph.D. candidate in Hartmann’s laboratory, Bush now is a postdoctoral fellow at the Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Sara Solla, a professor of physiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and of physics and astronomy in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, is the other senior author of the study.<\/p>\n

Previous studies ‘too restricted, simplified’ <\/b><\/p>\n

With just a brush of their whiskers, rats can extract detailed information from their environments, including an object’s distance, orientation, shape and texture. This keen ability makes the rat’s sensory system ideal for studying the relationship between mechanics (the moving whisker) and sensory input (touch signals sent to the brain). But despite the popularity of using the whisker system to explore the mystery of touch, many long-standing questions remain.<\/p>\n


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