Unconscious Touch Perception After Disruption of the Primary Somatosensory Cortex
研究发现，对初级体感皮层进行经颅磁刺激后，参与者虽失去触觉意识，但仍能准确判断触摸位置，揭示了无意识触觉感知的平行通路。
Brain damage or disruption to the primary visual cortex sometimes produces blindsight, a striking condition in which patients lose the ability to consciously detect visual information yet retain the ability to discriminate some attributes without awareness. Although there have been few demonstrations of somatosensory equivalents of blindsight, the lesions that produce "numbsense," in which patients can make accurate guesses about tactile information without awareness, have been rare and localized to different regions of the brain. Despite transient loss of tactile awareness in the contralateral hand after transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex but not TMS of a control site, 12 participants (six female) reliably performed at above-chance levels on a localization task. These results demonstrating TMS-induced numbsense implicate a parallel somatosensory pathway that processes the location of touch in the absence of awareness and highlight the importance of primary sensory cortices for conscious perception.