Abstract
Our research created a laboratory environment model for the purpose of evaluating subject’s somatic sensory change affected by human touching. Artificial sensory stimulus was applied percutaneously to ten female volunteers’ left median nerve.
While administering the stimulation, the experimenter kept touching the subject ’s right hand, or the body part which was not stimulated by artificial sensory stimulus.
We discussed whether or not the somatic sensory function, which is related to artificial sensory stimulus, would be affected by the human touching.
Somatic sensory cortex activity was measured with the use of SEP ( somatosensory evoked potential)．Afterwards, each subject was asked to mark the scale of their stimulus according to VAS ( visual analog scale) to express how intense the stimulus was. In one subject, SEP showed increase. In six subjects, VAS index showed a significant decrease ( p ＜ 0.01)．This research possibly indicates that while the somatic stimulation remain unchanged, hand touching can reduce subjective somatic sensory evaluation.
