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Our brain seems to reduce the sensory perception of an area of our skin when we touch it ourselves, according to a new Linköping University study published in the newspaper Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS. Discovery increases our understanding of how the brain distinguishes another person's contact with self-awareness.
We do not always question our concept of "self", but the ability to distinguish between oneself and others is extremely important. During the first period of life, newborns develop an understanding of where their own body ends, primarily by being touched by those who support them. Self-concept problems, such as the ability to recognize one's own actions, are common in many psychiatric disorders. Most people can not tickle, but some people with schizophrenia can, which suggests that their brain interprets sensory perceptions of their own body differently.
Scientists from Linköping University in Sweden have examined what happens in different parts of the nervous system when a person is touched by another person, and compared that with a corresponding personal touch. They showed that the brain reduces the treatment of sensory perception when it comes from the touch of self.
The skin contains sensory receptors that react to touch, pressure, heat and cold. The information on touch is pbaded from them to the spinal cord and the brain, where perception is treated in several stages in different regions of the brain. Researchers involved in the new study conducted several experiments in which healthy volunteers rested in a magnetic resonance camera, which recorded images of brain activity (fMRI). Participants were asked to caress their arms slowly with their own hands or to be informed that a researcher would caress their arm in the same way. The researchers studied the connection between these types of contact and activity in different parts of the brain.
"We found a clear difference between being touched by someone else and touching each other, in which case activity in many parts of the brain was We can see evidence that this difference is already occurring in the spinal cord, before perceptions are processed in the brain, "says Rebecca Böhme, lead author, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine and the Center for Neuroscience. Social and Affective (CSAN) Linköping University.
The results are consistent with a theory of brain research suggesting that the brain is trying to predict the sensory consequences of everything we do. This means that he does not attach so much importance to the sensory perceptions caused by our own body, because the resulting information is expected. In one of the experiments, the participant's arm was touched by filaments of different thickness, while the arm was simultaneously stroked by the participant or by another person. The researchers showed that the ability to experience simultaneous sensory perceptions was reduced when participants stroked their arms. Perhaps this phenomenon can explain why, for example, we rub our arms when we hit him against a table.
"Our results suggest that there is a difference from the beginning of the spinal cord in the treatment of sensory perceptions by touching oneself and those of touch by another person." This is extremely interesting. In the case of the visual system, this treatment of visual impressions takes place right from the retina, and it would be interesting to look in more detail at how the brain modulates the treatment of tactile perceptions in the spinal cord, "explains Rebecca Böhme.
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Material provided by University of Linköping. Note: Content can be changed for style and length.
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