Microneurography And Microstimulation Of Single Tactile Afferents In The Human Hand

Microneurography is a method, invented by Ake Vallbo and Karl-Erik Hagbarth in the late 1960, with which we can record the activity from single, identified nerve fibres in awake human participants. In this talk, I will then discuss the method, its advantages and limitations, and some of the key discoveries regarding coding of tactile events in the signalling from receptors in the human skin. An extension of the method is to stimulate single afferents, and record the resulting tactile sensations reported by the participants, so-called microstimulation. The first experiments were done in the 1980s, but the method has recently seen a revival, and is currently being combined with high-resolution brain imaging in the study of the relationship between tactile nerve signals, sensations, and processing of tactile information in the brain.