Pre-neuronal processing of haptic sensory cues via dispersive high-frequency vibrational modes

Sense of touch is one of the major perception channels. Neural coding of object textures conveyed by rodents’ whiskers has been a model to study early stages of haptic information uptake. While high-precision spike timing has been observed during whisker sweeping across textured surfaces, the exact nature of whisker micromotions that spikes encode remains elusive. Here, we discovered that a single micro-collision of a whisker with surface features generates vibrational eigenmodes spanning frequencies up to 10 kHz. While propagating along the whisker, these high-frequency modes can carry up to 80% of shockwave energy, exhibit 100× smaller damping ratio, and arrive at the follicle 10× faster than low frequency components. The mechano-transduction of these energy bursts into time-sequenced population spike trains may generate temporally unique “bar code” with ultra-high information capacity. This hypothesis of pre-neuronal processing of haptic signals based on dispersive temporal separation of the vibrational modal frequencies can shed light on neural coding of haptic signals in many whisker-like sensory organs across the animal world as well as in texture perception in primate’s glabrous skin.