The combination of intraneural microstimulation and 7T fMRI makes it possible to bridge the gap between first-order mechanoreceptive afferent input codes and their spatial, dynamic and perceptual representations in human cortex.

Synchronous recording of skin deformations at the contact with a transparent surface and of tactile afferents from the fingertip reveals that afferents signal incipient slip.

Delivering specific patterns of electrical activity to the median nerve of the arm triggers reliable sensations of texture, suggesting that it may ultimately be possible to restore complex tactile information to users of prosthetic limbs.

Lesion analyses in right hemisphere stroke patients reveal the crucial role of the right anterior and posterior insula in the perception of affective touch.

Individual human first-order tactile neurons, those that innervate the mechanoreceptors in the skin, can signal information about edge orientation differences at the limit of what people can feel and across a broad range of speeds relevant for real-world hand use.

Diverse muscle spindle firing, critical for a range of sensorimotor behaviors, is compactly explained by first principles of force development in specialized muscle fibers within the sensors.

Perception of vibrotactile frequency depends on the neural discharge pattern rather than the afferent type, thus requiring a reevaluation of the notion of Pacinian/non-Pacinian channels in tactile sensory system.

The melanocortin-4 receptor knockout mouse exhibits a cardiomyopathy syndrome, which raises concerns about cardiovascular function in patients with the similar loss of function mutations, and perhaps even in the 1 in 1500 patients with heterozygous loss of the gene.

Single-nucleus transcriptomics exposes unique features of human somatosensory neurons and clues that may help resolve repeated problems in translating new experimental approaches for treating pain.

By acting as versatile signal-processors that encode flexible coordinate representations, muscle spindles challenge current widely held views concerning the role of proprioceptors and the peripheral nervous system in sensorimotor function.