User experiences of pre-sleep sensory alpha brainwave entrainment for people with chronic pain and sleep disturbance.

To explore the user experiences of pre-sleep alpha entrainment via a smartphone-enabled audio or visual stimulation program for people with chronic pain and sleep disturbance. Semi-structured interviews were held with 27 participants completing a feasibility study of pre-sleep entrainment use for 4 weeks. Transcriptions were subject to template analysis.

Brain imaging of pain: state of the art.

Pain is a complex sensory and emotional experience that is heavily influenced by prior experience and expectations of pain. Before the development of noninvasive human brain imaging, our grasp of the brain's role in pain processing was limited to data from postmortem studies, direct recording of brain activity, patient experience and stimulation during neurosurgical procedures, and animal models of pain. Advances made in neuroimaging have bridged the gap between brain activity and the subjective experience of pain and allowed us to better understand the changes in the brain that are associated with both acute and chronic pain.

A role for midcingulate cortex in the interruptive effects of pain anticipation on attention.

Objective: To investigate the anticipatory neural processes associated with the interruptive effects of pain anticipation on attention.

Methods: Sustained attention was measured in healthy subjects (n=24) by the number of task errors in a go/no-go task involving temporal discrimination of non-painful cutaneous electrical stimuli. Painful distractors were randomly delivered to the same spatial location and the resulting increases in task errors (indicating interruption of attention) were measured.