I am posting several excerpts from the article by Chivukula et al and will also include comments when my research writings are relevant.
“Recent human neuroimaging studies suggest that the PPC [posterior parietal cortex] is . . . recruited during touch cognition in the absence of actual tactile input (e.g., seen touch or imagined touch), supporting a notion that both higher-level touch processing and tactile cognition share a neural substrate. . . . we investigated single- and multi-unit neural activity during the presentation of actual touch and during imagined touch to sensate dermatomes above the level of the participant’s injury [a tetraplegic human subject with a complete spinal cord injury at cervical level C3-4 with an electrode array implanted in the left PPC]. We found that neurons recorded at the junction of the postcentral and intraparietal sulci in humans . . . encoded actual touch at short latency (~50 ms) with bilateral spatially structured receptive fields, covering all tested, sensate regions within the head, face, neck, and shoulders. The tactile imagery task evoked body part-specific responses that shared a neural substrate with actual touch. Our results demonstrate that PPC neurons that discriminate touch are partially reactivated during a tactile imagery task in a body part-specific manner. . . . Recordings were made from a chronic implanted array, and thus neuronal waveform sorting resulted in both well-isolated neuronal waveforms and multi-neuron groupings.”
“Higher-level touch processing” mentioned by the authors is of interest. The investigators do not give mention to an immaterial cognitive mind in their study design, but I have endeavored to justify in my books and blog posts that imagery first occurs at the level of the mind. It must be acknowledged that many neuroscientists today deny dualism, reducing all mental activity to the brain’s material components. The questions I raise are (1) how the “evoked neural responses” described by the authors are generated, (2) how their generation relates to the cognitive immaterial mind, and (3) how the “evoked neural responses” may relate to the “neuronal waveforms” that I propose are generated by the immaterial mind. In my next blog post I will provide an elaboration on this important point of interest.