Beyond Maps

Somatosensory - the somatic senses arise in receptors located in the skin or embedded in muscles, tendons, joints, and the inner ear. Somatic senses include touch, pressure, vibration, warmth, cold, and pain plus proprioception.

This book provides a comprehensive description of the findings that contribute to the elaboration of a neural population-based theory for somesthetic perception in mammals. This theory incorporates the notion that time-dependent interactions between large neural ensembles, shaped by stereotyped exploratory tactile behaviours expressed since the animal's early postnatal life, constitute the neural substrate for the encoding of tactile information b the somatosensory system.

This new view provides one with the first account of how large populations of cortical and subcortical neurons may interact, in a dynamic and distributed fashion, to encode information about the surrounding environment.