6/6 🙏 Huge thanks 🙏 to the patients for their involvement and to the amazing teams at West Virginia University Hospital and EPFL, as well as co-authors including senior authors Ali Rezai and Olaf Blanke.

Link to the article: elifesciences.org/articles/95272

5/6 This points to multiple temporal stages of processing in subcortical circuits during perception.
While we’re cautious not to overclaim, it’s a rare window into how subcortical structures might be involved in perceptual consciousness.

4/6 Interestingly, we found a bimodal distribution of neuronal response latencies:
⏱ One early cluster ~ 120–150 ms
⏱ One late cluster ~ 315–330 ms
This was true for both sensory- and perception-selective neurons.

3/6 We labeled (putative) single neurons as:
🔹 Sensory-selective — firing changed after stimulus onset.
🔹 Perception-selective — firing differed between detected and missed stimuli.

2/6 During surgeries, microelectrode recordings guide targeting.

Meanwhile, we estimated patients’ tactile threshold and had them perform a 10-minute detection task. We recorded from the thalamus and subthalamic nucleus, maintaining a detection rate of ~50% using an adaptive procedure.

1/6 Recording single neurons in subcortical regions of the human 🧠 during cognitive tasks is pretty rare and challenging.

We utilized microelectrode recordings during deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgeries to investigate how these neurons may encode tactile perception.