“
“Despite the significance of human touch, brain responses to interpersonal manual touch have been rarely investigated. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in eight healthy adults whose left hand was touched by two individuals, in separate runs and in 20-s blocks, either by holding, smoothing, or poking. Acceleration was measured from both the subject’s and the touching person’s hands for postimaging control of the stimuli. Independent component

analysis of the functional magnetic resonance imaging data unraveled three functional networks involving the primary somatosensory cortex (SI). One network comprised the contralateral and another the ipsilateral Brodmann area 3. The third network included area 2 bilaterally, left-hemisphere middle temporal gyrus and dorsolateral prefrontal regions, ventral prefrontal cortices bilaterally, and middle cingulate cortex. The response Talazoparib nmr shapes and polarities varied between the three networks. The contralateral area 3 differentiated the responses between the three types of touch stimuli, and the response magnitudes depended on the variability of the touch within each block. However, the responses of the other two

networks were strikingly similar to all stimuli. The subjects’ reports on the pleasantness of the touch did not correlate with the characteristics of the SI responses. These findings imply area-specific processing of the natural human touch in three networks including the SI cortex, with only area 2 connected www.selleckchem.com/products/gsk-j4-hcl.html to a functional network of brain areas that may support social interaction. “
“In this multicentre study involving eight European centres, we characterized the spatial pattern of functional connectivity (FC) in the sensorimotor network from 61 right-handed patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) and 74 age-matched healthy subjects assessed

with the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and a simple motor task of their right dominant Erlotinib ic50 hand. FC was investigated by using: (i) voxel-wise correlations between the left sensorimotor cortex (SMC) and any other area in the brain; and (ii) bivariate correlations between time series extracted from several regions of interest (ROIs) belonging to the sensorimotor network. Both healthy controls and MS patients had significant FC between the left SMC and several areas of the sensorimotor network, including the bilateral postcentral and precentral gyri, supplementary motor area, middle frontal gyri, insulae, secondary somatosensory cortices, thalami, and right cerebellum. Voxel-wise assessment of FC revealed increased connectivity between the left SMC and the right precentral gyrus, right middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and bilateral postcentral gyri in MS patients as compared with controls.