Nature research paper: Vicarious body maps bridge vision and touch in the human brain
go.nature.com/4839zaL
Massive congratulations to lead author @HedgerResearch, and co-authors Thomas Naselaris and @cvnlab .
Read the open-access paper here 👇
bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
#Neuroscience #BrainMapping #VicariousTouch
Investigating individual-specific topographic organization has traditionally been a resource-intensive and time-consuming process. But what if we could map visual cortex organization in thousands of brains? Here we offer the community with a toolbox that can do just that! tinyurl.com/deepretinotopy
A mode of brain organization that connects visual and bodily reference frames may translate raw sensory impressions into more abstract formats that are useful for action, social cognition and semantic processing.
go.nature.com
On the nose
New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.
This provides a mechanistic basis for everyday vicarious experiences — like flinching when you see someone fall — but the implications go far deeper:
• Social cognition
• Sensory and clinical neuroscience (e.g., ASD)
• Embodied AI & AGI development
This paper had a pretty shocking headline result (40% of voxels!), so I dug into it, and I think it is wrong. Essentially: they compare two noisy measures and find that about 40% of voxels have different sign between the two. I think this is just noise!
