Suffering from an intense ‘pain’ is not simply a bitter sensation, rather it is a whole comprehension that is likely to include more senses than just the bodily ones. Several factors, including our beliefs and the surrounding circumstances of an event, can determine how one perceives pain. But how does the brain organize this all in a concise and coherent way to inscribe a singular notion of pain? A recent article in Science Advanced answers this question.
The Research:
A group of researchers from Sungkyunkwan University located in South Korea used fMRI to visualize how the brain responds to pain inducing stimuli (by conducting an experiment). Here’s what they did:
- Participants were given visual cues to depict the level of pain that they were expected to feel prior to heating the participant’s arm.
- Then, they recorded their brain activity when Subjects were asked to rate their pain.
- They further utilized this data by deploying complex computational methods to examine how information regarding pain is represented in various parts of the brain.
Key Findings:
Information Processing Across the Brain:
We expected that the networks studied would be useless, all the way from basic sensory areas, to more sophisticated cognitive networks – would contain any information the patients had about pain cues and the real pain, in this case, the heat.
This supports the hypothesis that the localization of pain perception may not be overly emphasized as previously thought.
Integration of Pain Information:
However, some regions incorporated such information to correlate with the recalled pain of the participants, even though a large number of brain regions contained information related to pain. The limbic network and the default mode network were of special importance for the performance of this operation.
A Hierarchy of Pain Processing.
Also, the study has indicated, there is some structure on how the information concerning pain is handled by the brain. It is sensory regions, touch for example, or vision, that would be very competent in encapsulating the traces of some pain or other professionally speaking, left insights. More advanced so-called higher order cortical regions were superior in the handling and synthesis of multiple aspects of pain information.
Why This Matters.
This type of investigation is important since I believe it offers a novel methodological approach to understanding how we experience pain subjectively. For it is clear that although many parts of the brain are actually engaged in the processing of pain-related information, only a few of these regions integrate these images in such a way as to fit the pain that we may feel consciously.
These findings should be quite significant for the issue of pain control and treatment. Chronic pain can be treated more effectively if we know what brain networks are important for the integration of pain information.
The Big Picture.
This research belongs to the area of growing interest within the field of neuroscience where effects on performance of numerous areas are considered rather than the individual region from which the changes have been studied.
There, the difficulty is pointed out in the manner of pain interpretation as well as in the assumption that pain is achieved as in the end of a processing in the brain that entails a series of elaborate networking and processing.
This branch of research is worth investigating for the purpose of predicting, controlling, and treating pain suffering in a way which is more effective than what is currently possible.
