Elsevier

Neuroscience

Volume 84, Issue 3, 24 February 1998, Pages 635-639
Neuroscience

Letter to Neuroscience
Sensory information processing in the dorsal column nuclei by neuronal oscillators

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0306-4522(97)00694-5Get rights and content

Abstract

The dorsal column nuclei, a first relay station of the somatosensory system, express coherent oscillatory activity in the 4–22 Hz frequency range at single unit, multiunit and local field potential levels. This activity appears spontaneously (33% of the cases) or, more commonly (83%), during natural sensory stimulation of the receptive field. Such oscillations are not imposed upon the dorsal column nuclei by incoming sensory afferents nor cortico-nuclear projections, which indicates that they are generated within the dorsal column nuclei. We concluded that dorsal column nuclei transform a non-rhythmic input from the periphery to a populational oscillatory output to the somatosensory thalamus during sensory stimulation.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by a CICYT Grant (SAF96-0031).

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