One of the best workshops I attended at the IASP congress in Milano was on placebo analgesia, run by three very classy speakers: Luana Colloca, Ulrike Bingel, and Regine Klinger.I learnt lots about the neurobiological mechanisms of placebo and nocebo, and came away with lots to ponder. This is what I learnt:The rostral anterior cingulate … [Read more...]
Just how much can the coloured blobs tell us
July 3, 2012 by 2 Comments
When it comes to treating someone in pain we have one way of knowing if our treatment has effected pain relief, and that is the patient’s verbal report. Perhaps another way of knowing whether pain has changed is to look at what’s happening in the brain. Well, this review is addressing precisely this question. Presented here[1] are the … [Read more...]
Timing is everything
December 22, 2011 by 4 Comments
Human brain mapping doesn’t go back as far as one might think. The first brain activation studies used positron emission tomography (PET) back in the late 1980s. Functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, followed in the early 90s and went on to radically change neuroimaging [1].Given that it’s such early days for brain mapping, … [Read more...]
Not just another empathy study
December 13, 2011 by 5 Comments
In this paper, Lamm and colleagues investigate what might modulate empathy. While there have been loads of neuroimaging studies in empathy, many have failed to recognise that empathy is highly malleable by a number of factors. With two fMRI experiments, this group studied two cognitive mechanisms of top-down control—attention and cognitive … [Read more...]
Regret, empathy, espresso
December 9, 2011 by 2 Comments
I’ve got news for those of us who thought that Italians just sat around wearing designer sunglasses and drinking fine coffee; it turns out we were wrong. This fMRI study by a group in Milan is a pearler, and I urge anyone who’s interested to have a look at it.[1]First was a look into empathy: these investigators wanted to know whether … [Read more...]
Someone else’s pain—Are you in or out?
October 25, 2011 by 2 Comments
One of the bits of the brain I find the toughest to understand is the insula. We hear about it when the “pain matrix” is discussed. The insula is part of what is currently understood as the medial pain system— involved in assigning meaning, emotion and affect to the pain experience[1]. Various neuroimaging studies have found activity in … [Read more...]
More Q than A
August 16, 2011 by 4 Comments
Recently I was watching Q&A on the ABC. For those of you who’ve not seen it, Q&A, short for Questions and Answers, is a debate-style programme which brings together a panel of politicians and other prominents, and takes questions from the audience regarding topical issues. Every week I find myself intensely frustrated by the … [Read more...]
Introducing Flavia Di Pietro. Imaging the Brain
August 11, 2011 by 4 Comments
Flavia Di Pietro Flavia Di Pietro is a PhD student in the Body and Mind Research Group, Sydney. She is investigating the development of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) after wrist fracture. Specifically, Flavia’s PhD involves brain scanning people who are in a higher than usual amount of pain in the first 3 weeks after the fracture, and … [Read more...]
Promising results from a graded retraining programme in chronic back pain
June 29, 2011 by 3 Comments
Reduction in pain and disability with a graded sensorimotor retraining program in chronic back painOur team recently returned home from Darwin, where we all attended the Australian Pain Society’s Annual Scientific Meeting. We all presented some of our work up there and had a lot of fun while we were at it. I presented a poster, based on … [Read more...]
What’s in a name? Nociception by any other name will hurt, or not hurt, just as much
March 31, 2011 by 18 Comments
A while back I wrote a piece about Consciousness and Pain, in which I argued that consciousness might be the key ingredient for pain. I even tried my hand at a bit of maths, with this little equation (not to be taken too exactly): pain = nociception + consciousness. I got a great response to this post. People had some really interesting … [Read more...]
Sadness, soreness and staying alert—all in the same place
March 8, 2011 by 3 Comments
The integration of negative affect, pain and cognitive control in the cingulate cortex is a recently published review, which raises some interesting ideas [1].The best place to start is with a bit of neuroanatomy...if you were to cut your brain straight down the middle into two hemispheres and check out the medial surface of both hemispheres … [Read more...]
Can one have pain and not know it?
February 8, 2011 by 34 Comments
By Flavia Di PietroI think about this a lot. It leads me to ponder the distinction between pain and nociception. We found a chapter on exactly this in a great book we are slowly reviewing at BiM – The Science of Pain. The chapter’s title grabbed me: Conciousness and Pain. It’s really got me thinking about both, and in particular … [Read more...]
Lions and lollipops. The brain’s amazing race for meaning.
November 9, 2010 by 5 Comments
Some take the tube, others the train...The Amazing Race in the brain It makes sense that we need to process and respond to some stuff we see quicker than other stuff we see. Take for instance a lion versus a lollipop. This paper by Pessoa and Adolphs explores the mechanisms behind emotional processing of visual stimuli, and more specifically … [Read more...]
Introducing DAMIEN – the brain’s default mode network
October 28, 2010 by Leave a Comment
Numerous studies involving functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain, tell us that chronic back pain (CBP) alters brain function well beyond the feeling of pain and can cause impairments like depression, impaired decision-making and sleep disturbance [1,2].It was Baliki’s group in 2008 which confirmed for the first time that … [Read more...]
How the brain makes us feel
October 26, 2010 by 3 Comments
Bud Craig’s 2009 paper: How do you feel—now? The anterior insula and human awareness brings together findings of numerous authors in a discussion of functional imaging of the anterior insular cortex (AIC) and the starring role it plays in human awareness. The groundwork for this recent Perspective, and arguably for much of the research in … [Read more...]
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