Influence of pain on motor preparation in the human brain.

The protective function of pain depends on appropriate motor responses to avoid injury and promote recovery. The preparation and execution of motor responses is thus an essential part of pain. However, it is not yet fully understood how pain and motor processes interact in the brain.

Autonomic responses to tonic pain are more closely related to stimulus intensity than to pain intensity.

Pain serves the protection of the body by translating noxious stimulus information into a subjective percept and protective responses. Such protective responses rely on autonomic responses that allocate energy resources to protective functions. However, the precise relationship between objective stimulus intensity, subjective pain intensity, autonomic responses, and brain activity is not fully clear yet.

Brain oscillations differentially encode noxious stimulus intensity and pain intensity.

Noxious stimuli induce physiological processes which commonly translate into pain. However, under certain conditions, pain intensity can substantially dissociate from stimulus intensity, e.g.

Prefrontal Gamma Oscillations Encode Tonic Pain in Humans.

Under physiological conditions, momentary pain serves vital protective functions. Ongoing pain in chronic pain states, on the other hand, is a pathological condition that causes widespread suffering and whose treatment remains unsatisfactory. The brain mechanisms of ongoing pain are largely unknown.

Differential neurophysiological correlates of bottom-up and top-down modulations of pain.

The perception of pain is highly variable. It depends on bottom-up-mediated factors like stimulus intensity and top-down-mediated factors like expectations. In the brain, pain is associated with a complex pattern of neuronal responses including evoked potentials and induced responses at alpha and gamma frequencies.