How the brain reduces pain
Researchers at Birkbeck and UCL have made further discoveries about how the brain...
Researchers at Birkbeck, University of London and UCL have made further discoveries about how the brain works to reduce our experience of acute pain.
A paper to be published in The Journal of Neuroscience this month outlines a study carried out by the team, led by Dr Matthew Longo, of the Department of Psychological Sciences, which identifies brain mechanisms responsible for the analgesic effect of looking at the body.
In previous research, the team has consistently found that seeing one’s stimulated body part reduces the perceived intensity of acute pain. For example, last year the team from Birkbeck, University College London and the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy, published research which showed that pain experienced when a hot object touched skin on the hand was reduced when looking at the hand. They also showed that the level of pain experienced depended on how large the hand looked – the larger the hand the greater the effect of pain reduction.
“While our research has already established that the visual context of seeing the body can reduce the experience of acute pain, what’s new in this research is understanding further how that happens in the brain,” said Dr Longo.
In the new study an infrared laser was used to deliver a painful stimulus to the right hand of 14 participants, who looked either at their stimulated right hand, or at another object. The results showed that seeing the body increased the amount of ‘cross talk’ or connectivity between two large-scale brain networks; one associated with how we view the body, and the other responsible for how we process information about pain.
“We are getting a better idea of how our brains work to process pain. The functional connectivity shown in our new study has implications longer term for how we manipulate and reduce pain, particularly chronic pain,” said Dr Longo.