📚 Where you can find it

The full open-access article is published in PLOS Biology: journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

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🌐 Why it matters:
ESI opens the door to precise, real-time monitoring of the spinal cord🔍🧩, with the potential to advance both basic neuroscience 🧠 and clinical neurophysiology 🏥offering diagnostic tools for conditions like spinal dysfunction and spinal cord injury.

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And here’s the real wow moment 🤯⚡: attention actually changes spinal activity, revealing that our cognitive state can influence sensory processing all the way down in the spinal cord, not just in the brain.

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These signals correspond to different steps in the sensory processing chain:
-on the side of the stimulation, sP9 reflects a traveling volley of incoming sensory input⚡➡️
- central and symmetrical in the spine, sN13 and sP22 capture local postsynaptic processing 🔄

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We detected 3 electrical responses in the spinal cord: sP9, sN13, and sP22 ⚡ (numbers reflect their timing in milliseconds after the stimulus). Each response represents a different stage of how sensory information is processed as it travels into the spinal cord.

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To activate the sensory system, we delivered gentle, controlled electrical pulses to the wrist 🔌✋. By recording signals from the peripheral nerves, spinal cord, and brain, we built high-resolution maps 🗺️⏱️ of how sensory information travels through the body.

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We then applied a rigorous, data-driven cleaning pipeline 🧼📊 to remove noise from muscles, movement, and other sources.
This allowed us to isolate the true spinal responses ⚡ with much higher clarity and spatial detail than previous noninvasive methods.

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We developed a new technique called Electrical Spinal Imaging (ESI). It uses a dense array of surface electrodes placed on the back to record tiny electrical signals from the spinal cord, while also capturing EEG (brain)🧠 and ECG (heart) ❤️‍🩹.

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Historically, neuroscience has lacked a reliable noninvasive way to record electrical activity directly from the human spinal cord: neuroimaging methods (e.g. fMRI) are limited by poor temporal resolution and artifacts.

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