Ventral posterior thalamic neurons differentially responsive to noxious stimulation of the awake monkey.

Of 76 cutaneously activated neurons recorded from the ventral posterior thalamus of awake, behaving monkeys, nine were weakly excited by innocuous skin stimulation and responded maximally only when noxious mechanical cutaneous stimuli were delivered within small, contralateral receptive fields. These results show that neurons capable of encoding the spatial and temporal features of noxious stimuli are located in the ventral posterior thalamus of the awake primate.