Self-regulated analgesia in males but not females is mediated by endogenous opioids.

Converging lines of preclinical and clinical research indicate that females, in stark contrast to males, display an increased prevalence of chronic pain. Females also demonstrate weaker analgesic efficacy in response to opioid therapies when compared with males. These sex-specific differences may be driven by dimorphic endogenous opioidergic responses.

The role of endogenous opioids in mindfulness and sham mindfulness-meditation for the direct alleviation of evoked chronic low back pain: a randomized clinical trial.

Chronic low back pain (cLBP) is the most prevalent chronic pain condition. There are no treatments that haven been found to directly assuage evoked cLBP. To this extent, mindfulness-meditation is a promising pain therapy.

Neurophysiological Mechanisms Supporting Mindfulness Meditation-Based Pain Relief: an Updated Review.

Purpose Of Review: This review examines recent (2016 onwards) neuroscientific findings on the mechanisms supporting mindfulness-associated pain relief. To date, its clear that mindfulness lowers pain by engaging brain processes that are distinct from placebo and vary across meditative training level. Due to rapid developments in the field of contemplative neuroscience, an update review on the neuroimaging studies focused on mindfulness, and pain is merited.

Time Cells in the Hippocampus Are Neither Dependent on Medial Entorhinal Cortex Inputs nor Necessary for Spatial Working Memory.

A key function of the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex is to bridge events that are discontinuous in time, and it has been proposed that medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) supports memory retention by sustaining the sequential activity of hippocampal time cells. Therefore, we recorded hippocampal neuronal activity during spatial working memory and asked whether time cells depend on mEC inputs. Working memory was impaired in rats with mEC lesions, but the occurrence of time cells and of trajectory-coding cells in the stem did not differ from controls.