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The somatosensory system relays sensory information from the skin, mucous membranes, limbs, and joints. Somatosensation is more familiarly known as the sense of touch. A typical somatosensory pathway includes three types of long neurons: primary, secondary, and tertiary. Primary neurons have cell bodies located near the spinal cord in groups of neurons called dorsal root ganglia. The sensory neurons of ganglia innervate designated areas of skin called dermatomes.

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The brain processes sensory information rapidly due to parallel processing, which involves sending data across multiple neural pathways at the same time. This method allows the brain to manage various sensory qualities, such as shapes, colors, movements, and locations, all concurrently. For instance, when observing a forest landscape, the brain simultaneously processes the movement of leaves, the shapes of trees, the depth between them, and the various shades of green. This enables a quick and...

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Related Experiment Video

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Tactile Semiautomatic Passive-Finger Angle Stimulator TSPAS

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Published on: July 30, 2020

Reading Braille by Touch Recruits Posterior Parietal Cortex.

Yun-Fei Liu¹, Brenda Rapp¹, Marina Bedny¹

¹Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD.

Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience

|August 16, 2023

Summary

Brain imaging reveals that the posterior parietal cortex (PPC) processes braille orthography, distinguishing real words from non-words. This tactile reading system involves specific brain regions beyond basic touch sensation.

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Area of Science:

Neuroscience
Cognitive Science
Sensory Processing

Background:

Blind individuals utilize braille, a tactile reading system using raised dots.
Understanding the neural mechanisms of tactile reading is crucial for cognitive neuroscience.
Previous research has focused on somatosensory and semantic processing, but orthographic processing in braille remains less understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate brain activity related to orthographic processing in braille reading.
To differentiate braille-specific orthographic processes from low-level somatosensory and semantic responses.
To explore the role of posterior parietal cortices (PPCs) in high-level tactile perception during reading.

Main Methods:

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used on congenitally blind, proficient braille readers.
Participants read real words and pseudowords presented in braille.
English braille contractions were leveraged to decouple physical braille length from orthographic word length.

Main Results:

The bilateral supramarginal gyrus in the PPC showed increased activity with increasing uncontracted word length.
Primary somatosensory cortex (S1) activity correlated with the number of dots per braille word (a low-level feature).
The PPC exhibited greater activation for pseudowords versus real words and distinguished between them in multivariate analyses.

Conclusions:

The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is implicated in braille orthographic processing, including character and word recognition.
These findings suggest a distinct neural basis for tactile orthography, potentially adapted from visual reading pathways.
The study highlights the brain's remarkable plasticity in adapting neural resources for reading across different sensory modalities.