Brain Imaging of Experimental Pain

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The long-term objective of my research is to understand how the brain produces pain, and the behaviors associated with it. To study pain, studies in my lab generally induce pain in healthy participants using thermal or electrical stimulations. We seek funding to urgently replace two thermal stimulators and purchase one additional thermal stimulator and two additional electrical stimulators. My lab has grown exponentially since my arrival at McGill in 2016, and currently trains a total of 24 graduate, undergraduate and post-doctoral students. We also share equipment with > 7 collaborators in Montreal. Limited access to thermal and electrical stimulators creates a bottleneck that now severely impairs the capacity of my trainees to efficiently conduct their research projects. Research in the lab aims at studying the impact of various psychological variables on pain such as emotions, expectations, attention and motivation. For the next 5-year cycle of research, research in my lab will focus on, but not be restricted to, the study of the pain-reducing effects of performing a demanding cognitive task on pain perception. Every second, we are bombarded with a multitude of sensory inputs from the environment or from our body, but our brains can only process a fraction of that information at any given time. Subjectively perceived pain should therefore be conceived as the result of the competition between incoming nociceptive signals and other valued activities for access to limited cognitive resources. One prominent model of consciousness is the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW). According to the GNW model, the content of consciousness is determined by the nature of the information that reaches a fronto-parietal "global workspace". Our general hypothesis is that perceived pain results from the competition between pain and task "neurosignatures" for access to the GNW. The proposed program of research centers around 3 studies examining different facets of pain-cognition interactions. Study 1 will investigate the analgesic effects of the cognitive load and value of a concurrent working memory task. Study 2 will examine how cognitive fatigue reduces the motivation to perform a concurrent working memory task and the associated analgesia. Finally, study 3 will examine how performing a passionate activity potentiates the analgesic effect of performing a concurrent cognitive task. The proposed experiments will provide a better understanding of the dynamic cerebral processes causing our conscious experience pain, and how to potentially control it.