In my neuroscience research, I try to understand how the nervous system processes somatosensory information and controls movement, with a particular focus on the hand.
Typing; playing with lego; prepping food—these all require you to quickly process incoming sensory information from your hand while simultaneouslty controlling your fingers. And yet, these movements often feel effortless. Why? How do we achieve such elegant control of the hands?
To study this, I measure distributed patterns of brain activity while people perform hand movements or experience stimulation delivered to the hand. I then interrogate these brain activity patterns using a Bayesian approach to explore:
I've also examined how tactile sensory inputs from multiple fingers are integrated in the brain.
We used a custom-built device to deliver tactile stimulation to each fingertip independently. Using a family of computational models, we found that brain activity patterns in the primary somatosensory cortex became increasingly complex as more fingers were simultaneously stimulated, suggesting that sensory inputs from multiple fingers are integrated in unique ways depending on the pattern of stimulation.
We think that this complex integration serves as the foundation for dexterous object manipulation since it allows for a highly flexible mapping between somatosensory inputs and motor responses of the hand.
