Neural coding of tactile signals

We are interested in the neural basis of the sense of touch, especially how information related to touch is encoded in various brain structures within the somatosensory pathway of the brain.

Figure

External stimuli cause mechnoreceptors embedded in the skin to fire discrete electrical impulses (spikes, or action potentials). These spikes then propogate to the primary somatosensory cortex through various stages within this pathway, ultimately forming the substrate for tactile sensation. How are the features of tactile stimuli represented in the thalamus and cortex (neural coding)? On the other hand, from the prospective of the brain, what the brain sees is the distributed spike trains. How does the brain extract information about external stimuli from spike trains (reading a neural code or neural decoding)?

Columbia Affiliations
The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science
The Center for Neural Engineering and Computation