ArticleScience advances2022
Malleability of the cortical hand map following a finger nerve block.
Article in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
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Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Repetitive somatosensory stimulation shrinks the body image.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Trial
- Cutting a nerve of the hand alters the organization of digit maps in primary somatosensory cortex.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- On the impact of tactile processing on motor cortex: how touch shapes motor behaviour.Brain structure & function · 2026Review
- Stable cortical body maps before and after arm amputation.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- TMS-Based Neurofeedback Training of Mental Finger Individuation Induces Neuroplastic Changes in the Sensorimotor System.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Distinguishing the activity of adjacent somatosensory nuclei within the brainstem using 3T fMRI.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- A neurocognitive pathway for engineering artificial touch.Science advances · 2024Review
- A preliminary study exploring the effects of transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation on spinal excitability and phantom limb pain in people with a transtibial amputation.Journal of neural engineering · 2024Article
- Against cortical reorganisation.eLife · 2023Article
- Reassessing referral of touch following peripheral deafferentation: The role of contextual bias.Cortex; a journal devoted to the study of the nervous system and behavior · 2023Article
- Similar somatotopy for active and passive digit representation in primary somatosensory cortex.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
- The 3D Structural Architecture of the Human Hand Area Is Nontopographic.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- S1 represents multisensory contexts and somatotopic locations within and outside the bounds of the cortical homunculus.Cell reports · 2023Article
- Intact finger representation within primary sensorimotor cortex of musician's dystonia.Brain : a journal of neurology · 2023Article
- More comprehensive proprioceptive stimulation of the hand amplifies its cortical processing.Journal of neurophysiology · 2022Article
- Beyond body maps: Information content of specific body parts is distributed across the somatosensory homunculus.Cell reports · 2022Article
- Changes in Primary Somatosensory Cortex Following Allogeneic Hand Transplantation or Autogenic Hand Replantation.Frontiers in neuroimaging · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 8 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Electrophysiological studies in monkeys show that finger amputation triggers local remapping within the deprived primary somatosensory cortex (S1). Human neuroimaging research, however, shows persistent S1 representation of the missing hand's fingers, even decades after amputation. Here, we explore whether this apparent contradiction stems from underestimating the distributed peripheral and central representation of fingers in the hand map. Using pharmacological single-finger nerve block and 7-tesla neuroimaging, we first replicated previous accounts (electrophysiological and other) of local S1 remapping. Local blocking also triggered activity changes to nonblocked fingers across the entire hand area. Using methods exploiting interfinger representational overlap, however, we also show that the blocked finger representation remained persistent despite input loss. Computational modeling suggests that both local stability and global reorganization are driven by distributed processing underlying the topographic map, combined with homeostatic mechanisms. Our findings reveal complex interfinger representational features that play a key role in brain (re)organization, beyond (re)mapping.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.