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  • RESEARCH BRIEFINGS

The brain’s encoding of warm and cool

The cerebral cortex is the outer folded layer of the brain. It contains a population of neuronal cells that is dedicated to the representation of temperature. The activity of neurons in this ‘thermal cortex’ is different for warming compared with cooling, and is required for the perception of temperature.

This is a summary of: Vestergaard, M. et al. The cellular coding of temperature in the mammalian cortex. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-05705-5 (2023).

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-00158-2

‘Expert opinion’ is published under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

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