Cutaneous rabbit illusion affects human primary sensory cortex somatotopically

As much as neuroscientists know about the neural processes that signal touch, surprisingly little is understood about the neural correlates of conscious perception of tactile sensations.

In a new study in the open-access journal PLoS Biology, Felix Blankenburg, Jon Driver, and their colleagues turn to a classic somatosensory illusion - called the cutaneous rabbit - that is perfectly suited to decoupling real and illusory touch. In the illusion, a rapid succession of taps is delivered first to the wrist and then to the elbow, which creates the sensation of intervening taps hopping up the arm (hence the illusion's name), even when no physical stimulus is applied at intervening sites on the arm.

Blankenburg et al. took advantage of this somatosensory illusion to investigate which brain regions play a role in illusory tactile perceptions. Previous studies had implicated the somatosensory cortex--the region of the cortex that first receives input from sensors in the body--in the rabbit illusion, but did not directly test this possibility. To do this, the authors used state-of-the-art functional magnetic resonance imaging technology (called 3T fMRI) to scan the brains of people experiencing the illusion. With the enhanced image quality and resolution of this scanner (deriving from the stronger magnetic field plus a specially customized imaging sequence), the authors show that the same brain sector is activated whether the tactile sensation is illusory or real.

To identify brain-related activity associated with real and illusory perceptions, the researchers taped three electrodes to the inner side of participants' left forearms, one just above the wrist, the others spaced equidistantly toward the elbow. Electrical stimulation could be applied to these points while participants lay in the scanner. For the genuine rabbit experience, each point received three pulses in succession. For the illusion, pulses were only delivered to the first and third points, but subjects perceived that the second point had also been stimulated by virtue of the illusions created by the timing of the pulses.

Blankenburg et al. looked for brain regions that showed similar increases in neuronal activity during the real and illusory rabbit conditions, compared with the controls, and also looked for any regions that differed between the two conditions. Only one area showed similar and heightened activity during the genuine and illusory rabbit sequences, compared with controls: the precentral gyrus, where the first cortical area to represent touch is located (called S1). The increased activity within S1 fell in the exact sector corresponding to the middle on the forearm (even though it was not actually stimulated during the illusion). The researchers confirmed this correspondence by separate somatotopic mapping of the skin sites' representation in each participant's brain when each site was stimulated (with no illusion produced).

Altogether, these results suggest that the illusion of being touched at a particular place on the body engages exactly the same sector of the brain that would respond if that body part had actually been touched. This connection between conscious perception and somatotopic cortical processing for illusory percepts may shed light on conditions such as phantom limb pain following amputation, and other perceptual illusions associated with disease. The authors point out that recent fMRI studies have shown somewhat analogous effects in the visual system, with the primary visual cortex involved in some conscious visual illusions. It's still unclear if this phenomenon will hold for all other perceptual systems as well, but future studies can now explore how the brain bridges the gap between actual stimulation and conscious experience.