The neural substrates of physical fatigue sensation to evaluate ourselves: a magnetoencephalography study

It is important to clarify the neural mechanisms underlying fatigue sensation. There have been several studies which identified brain regions in which the level of the neural activities was correlated with the subjective level of fatigue. However, the neural activity evoked when we evaluate our level of fatigue may not be related to the subjective level of fatigue. Thus, we tried to identify the neural activities caused by the evaluation of the level of fatigue, which may not be related to the subjective level of fatigue. We used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure neural activity in 10 healthy participants enrolled in our study. During MEG recordings, participants were asked to evaluate the level of physical fatigue in their right hand in time with execution cues (evaluation session) or to direct attention to their right hand in time with execution cues (control session). Equivalent current dipole (ECD) analysis was performed to localize the neural activity limited to the evaluation session. In the evaluation session, ECDs with mean latencies of approximately 380ms were observed in nine of 10 participants. These were localized in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), while in the control session, the ECDs in the same brain region were observed in only two of 10 participants. The proportion of participants in whom ECDs were observed in the PCC in the evaluation session was significantly higher than that in the control session (McNemar test). In addition, the intensities of the ECDs were positively associated with the extent to which the participants successfully evaluated the fatigue in their right hand in the evaluation session. These data suggest that the PCC is involved in the neural substrates associated with self-evaluation of physical fatigue.