The sensation of a mobile phone vibrating is familiar. The perception of these vibrations derives from specialized receptors that transduce them into neural signals sent to the brain. But how does the brain encode their physical characteristics? To understand this, neuroscientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) have observed what happens in the brains of mice whose forepaws perceive vibrations. They discovered that neurons in the somatosensory cortex are activated in a manner similar to those in the sound-reactive auditory cortex. These results, published in the journal Nature, suggest that feeling a phone vibrate or hearing it ring is ultimately based on the same brain codes.
* This article was originally published here
