We’re pleased to announce that a paper by Dr Nicholas Hedger and colleagues has been published in the journal Nature.
In a new paper published in Nature, Dr Nicholas Hedger, together with collaborators from the Free University Amsterdam and the University of Minnesota, uncover why watching an injury on screen can sometimes make you ‘feel’ the injury yourself.
The paper highlights the brain organisation supporting cross-modal integration of visual and somatosensory information. Through analysing participants’ brain activity as they watched two different films, the study shows that watching movie scenes can activate touch-processing regions of your own brain in a highly organised way. These amazing findings were revealed using clever analyses and call into question some traditional views of the visual system and somatosensory mapping (cf Penfield’s homunculus).
The University of Reading’s press office wrote a press release summarising the findings and their potential for clinical applications, see https://www.reading.ac.uk/news/2025/Research-News/Brain-body-maps-bridge-vision-and-touch-in-human-…
Access the paper published in Nature here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09796-0