Revealing the neural fingerprints of a missing hand
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Abstract
The hand area of the primary somatosensory cortex contains detailed finger topography, thought to be shaped and maintained by daily life experience. Here we utilise phantom sensations and ultra high-field neuroimaging to uncover preserved, though latent, representation of amputees' missing hand. We show that representation of the missing hand's individual fingers persists in the primary somatosensory cortex even decades after arm amputation. By demonstrating stable topography despite amputation, our finding questions the extent to which continued sensory input is necessary to maintain organisation in sensory cortex, thereby reopening the question what happens to a cortical territory once its main input is lost. The discovery of persistent digit topography of amputees' missing hand could be exploited for the development of intuitive and fine-grained control of neuroprosthetics, requiring neural signals of individual digits.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
Merton College, University of Oxford (Graduate School Studentship)
- Sanne Kikkert
Wellcome Trust (UK Strategic Award , 098369/Z/12/Z)
- Christian F Beckmann
Medical Research Council (Graduate School Studentship)
- Sanne Kikkert
University College, Oxford (Stevenson Junior Research Fellowship)
- James Kolasinski
Medical Research Council (MR/L009013/1)
- Saad Jbabdi
Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (NWO-Vidi 864-12-003)
- Christian F Beckmann
Wellcome Trust (Strategic Award)
- Irene Tracey
NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre
- Irene Tracey
Wellcome Trust (Principal Research Fellow, 110027/Z/15/Z)
- Heidi Johansen-Berg
Wellcome Trust and Royal Society (Sir Henry Dale Fellowship, 104128/Z/14/Z)
- Tamar R Makin
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: Ethical approval was granted by the NHS National Research Ethics service (10/H0707/29) and written informed consent was obtained from all participants prior to the study.
Copyright
© 2016, Kikkert et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Revealing the neural fingerprints of a missing hand
eLife 5:e15292.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.15292
