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Chemical Senses Advance Access published online on September 7, 2005
Chemical Senses, doi:10.1093/chemse/bji059
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© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org
Accepted August 12, 2005

Article

Laterality of Human Primary Gustatory Cortex Studied by MEG

Keiko Onoda 1*, Tatsu Kobayakawa 2, Minoru Ikeda 3, Sachiko Saito 2, and Akinori Kida 3

1 Department of Otolaryngology, Nihon University School of Medicine, Tokyo 173-8610, Japan; Human Perception and Cognition Group, Neuroscience Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Ibaraki 305-8566, Japan
2 Human Perception and Cognition Group, Neuroscience Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Ibaraki 305-8566, Japan
3 Department of Otolaryngology, Nihon University School of Medicine, Tokyo 173-8610, Japan

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Keiko Onoda, E-mail: okeiko{at}med.nihon-u.ac.jp


  Abstract

We examined the laterality of the human gustatory neural pathway by measuring gustatory-evoked magnetic fields (GEMfs) and demonstrating the activation of the human primary gustatory cortex (PGC). In patients whose chorda tympani nerve had been severed unilaterally on the right side, we stimulated the normal side (i.e., left side) of the chorda tympani nerve with NaCl solution using a device developed for measuring GEMfs. We used the whole-head magnetoencephalography system for recording GEMfs and analyzed the frequency and latency of PGC activation in each hemisphere. "The transitional cortex between the insula and the parietal operculum" was identified as PGC with the base of the central sulcus in this experiment. Significant difference was found in frequencies among bilateral, only-ipsilateral, and only-contralateral responses by the Friedman test (P < 0.05), and more frequent bilateral responses were observed than only-ipsilateral (P < 0.05) or only-contralateral responses (P < 0.01) by the multiple comparison tests. In the bilateral responses, the averaged activation latencies of the transitional cortex between the insula and the parietal operculum were not significantly different in both hemispheres. These results suggest that unilateral gustatory stimulation will activate the transitional cortex between the insula and the parietal operculum bilaterally in humans.

Keywords: chorda tympani nerve; human gustatory pathway; laterality; magnetoencephalography; primary gustatory cortex; taste.
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[Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]


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