Ro Tony, Koenig Lua
Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Program in Psychology, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Psychol Sci. 2021 Apr;32(4):549-557. doi: 10.1177/0956797620970551. Epub 2021 Feb 26.
Brain damage or disruption to the primary visual cortex sometimes produces blindsight, a striking condition in which patients lose the ability to consciously detect visual information yet retain the ability to discriminate some attributes without awareness. Although there have been few demonstrations of somatosensory equivalents of blindsight, the lesions that produce "numbsense," in which patients can make accurate guesses about tactile information without awareness, have been rare and localized to different regions of the brain. Despite transient loss of tactile awareness in the contralateral hand after transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) of the primary somatosensory cortex but not TMS of a control site, 12 participants (six female) reliably performed at above-chance levels on a localization task. These results demonstrating TMS-induced numbsense implicate a parallel somatosensory pathway that processes the location of touch in the absence of awareness and highlight the importance of primary sensory cortices for conscious perception.
脑损伤或初级视觉皮层受到破坏有时会导致盲视，这是一种引人注目的情况，患者失去了有意识地检测视觉信息的能力，但仍保留了在无意识状态下辨别某些属性的能力。虽然几乎没有关于盲视的体感等效现象的证明，但导致“麻木感”（即患者能够在无意识状态下对触觉信息做出准确猜测）的损伤很少见，且局限于大脑的不同区域。尽管在对初级体感皮层进行经颅磁刺激（TMS）后，对侧手会出现短暂的触觉意识丧失，但对对照部位进行TMS时则不会出现这种情况，12名参与者（6名女性）在一项定位任务中的表现可靠地高于随机水平。这些表明TMS诱导麻木感的结果暗示了一条平行的体感通路，该通路在无意识状态下处理触摸的位置，并突出了初级感觉皮层对有意识感知的重要性。
