Dr Rochelle Ackerley | How do you feel? The contribution of a single mechanoreceptive afferent to tactile sensation

The skin is a complex system that gives rise to somatosensation, where the type and density of receptors varies greatly over the skin. I will explore the sense of touch in humans, from the well-studied discriminative touch provided by the glabrous skin of our hands, to the lesser-explored affective side of touch. To conduct this research, I use a variety of techniques, includes psychophysical and neuroimaging approaches, but also the technique of microneurography. There are few labs that conduct single unit microneurography, yet it allows us to record from, and even stimulate, an individual afferent in a peripheral nerve of a human. This helps us to bring the gap between fundamental human electrophysiology and perception. I will present some of my recent work where I combine single unit intra-neural microstimulation with 7T fMRI to investigate the representation of a single mechanoreceptive afferent in the human brain.