Functional dissociation of stimulus intensity encoding and predictive coding of pain in the insula
- University Medical Center Hamburg Eppendorf, Germany
- University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Abstract
The computational principles by which the brain creates a painful experience from nociception are still unknown. Classic theories suggest that cortical regions either reflect stimulus intensity or additive effects of intensity and expectations, respectively. By contrast, predictive coding theories provide a unified framework explaining how perception is shaped by the integration of beliefs about the world with mismatches resulting from the comparison of these believes against sensory input. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging during a probabilistic heat pain paradigm, we investigated which computations underlie pain perception. Skin conductance, pupil dilation, and anterior insula responses to cued pain stimuli strictly followed the response patterns hypothesized by the predictive coding model, whereas posterior insula encoded stimulus intensity. This novel functional dissociation of pain processing within the insula together with previously observed alterations in chronic pain offer a novel interpretation of aberrant pain processing as disturbed weighting of predictions and prediction errors.
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Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 936 A06)
- Christian Büchel
European Commission (ERC Advanced Investigator Grant 2010-AdG_20100407)
- Christian Büchel
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Fellowship GE 2774/1-1)
- Stephan Geuter
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Human subjects: The study was approved by and conducted in accordance with the ethics guidelines of the Medical Chamber Hamburg (PV4745). All participants provided informed consent to participate and to publish.
Copyright
© 2017, Geuter et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Functional dissociation of stimulus intensity encoding and predictive coding of pain in the insula
eLife 6:e24770.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.24770
