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How two intermingled sensory pathways combine to encode touch

Touch signals from the skin are carried to the brain by intermingled projections of two pathways in the spinal cord. These pathways convey distinct features of tactile stimuli, and converge differentially on brainstem neurons that direct different aspects of touch to various brain regions.

This is a summary of: Turecek, J. et al. The encoding of touch by somatically aligned dorsal column subdivisions. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05470-x (2022).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-03614-7

‘Expert opinion’ and the figure are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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