Speaker: Dr Donna Lloyd, Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Manchester

Donna has worked as a sensory scientist for over 25 years, applying the latest developments in functional brain imaging to understand the changes that occur in the central nervous system in response to touch, pain and itch in both healthy and clinical populations.

After obtaining a DPhil from the University of Oxford in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and sensory integration, she completed a two-year post-doctoral position at the Pain Research Institute, University of Liverpool, using fMRI to better understand the brain’s response to chronic pain. She is now a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Manchester where she teaches students about the complexities of human sensory experience and how this can be investigated using non-invasive neuroimaging techniques.

Synopsis

We’ve all had the experience of feeling something crawling on our skin only to look and find nothing there.

These illusory sensations of touch can give us fascinating insights into the relationship between the brain and body, which can be investigated using human neuroimaging and neuromodulation techniques. In this talk, I will present evidence from studies that have manipulated the brain’s intrinsic oscillatory activity to change the subjective perception of touch. I will show how pre-stimulus alpha brainwave activity is related to touch processing to create the necessary conditions for delivering touch with and without conscious awareness. I will then show how explicit manipulation of the alpha wave using transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) can change the subjective perception of not only experimentally applied touch but also pain and how we might adapt this neuromodulation tool in the future to treat chronic pain.