Huge thanks to my co-authors Lau Møller Andersen @ualsbombe.bsky.social, Mikkel Vinding, Noa Cemeljic @noacemeljic.bsky.social, Daniel Lundqvist and PI Konstantina Kilteni @kkilteni.bsky.social

This is the first evidence in humans that:

🅱️ Beta oscillations not only index motor preparation, but play a role in predicting self-touch.

🧠 Cerebellum sends predictive signals to the somatosensory cortex before self-touch.

This revealed greater pre-stimulus beta-band desynchronisation and increased cerebellar-to-somatosensory connectivity before self-touch compared to misaligned touch.

Next, how did we isolate pre-stim prediction-related effects from general movement-related activity? 🤔

✅ First subtract activity from the same conditions without tactile stimuli

✅ Then compare self-touch and misaligned touch - both have voluntary movement but one feels like you touch yourself!

As expected, self-touch evoked weaker somatosensory activity (as early as 50ms) compared to external and misaligned touch.

We compared the same touch under three conditions:

1. externally generated touch (no movement)

2. self-touch 👉👈

3. misaligned touch 👉 👈 (same movement, disrupted tactile prediction)

Movement kinematics were matched between self-touch and misaligned touch conditions 😎

Motor prediction reduces beta-band power and enhances cerebellar-somatosensory connectivity before self-touch to enable its attenuation Prevailing theories suggest that the brain uses an internal forward model to predict tactile input during voluntary movements, thereby reducing the intensity of the reafferent tactile sensation, a phe...

📣 New preprint 📣

The brain attenuates self-touch, but how does this unfold at the neural level before the touch? We used MEG to find out 🧠 👉👈