The world of touch--from evoked potentials to conscious perception.

Microelectrode recordings have enabled several maps of the body surface to be recognized in the mammalian somatosensory cortex. The maps appear to represent increasingly complex levels of analysis of the sensory message. At present the prevailing opinion is that the different components of the ERPs (event related potentials) represent sequential steps in such an analysis, and such an interpretation is supported by the enhancement of the ERPs …