Ketamine also led to increased functional connectivity of this temporoparietal region during other- vs. self-touch with several regions, including the insula and primary somatosensory cortex (S1). For S1, the strength of this increase correlated with dissociation symptoms.

As shown before, activation in the temporoparietal cortex / secondary somatosensory cortex is attenuated during self-touch compared to other-touch. This difference is preserved during ketamine administration, but clearly reduced.

We investigated this in a double-blind placebo-controlled crossover fMRI study. Participants clearly dissociated more when receiving ketamine compared to placebo.