Description:

"Chronic Pain: Longitudinal Dynamics, Top-Down Processing, and Computational Targets"

Chronic pain is a growing health crisis affecting 1 in 5 US adults and rates are rising globally. In this talk, we will explore three key themes related to chronic pain. Firstly, we will discuss the variability of pain and present a new collaborative platform called SOMAScience developed at Brown University that allows researchers US-wide to collect longitudinal uni- and multicenter pain data. SOMAScience uses our freely available smartphone app SOMA that tracks pain, mood, medication, expectation and many other aspects related to pain. Secondly, we will explore recent research suggesting that ongoing pain perception may be at least in part maintained by higher-order cognitive, limbic, and sensory processes, rather than peripheral nociceptive signaling. To assess the influence of top-down processing in chronic pain patients, we present the results from two tasks that explicitly assess (1) the role of context in avoidance learning using computational modeling and (2) attentional modulation of painful and non-painful sensory signals using EEG. 

Thursday June 29, 2023
CTPR Seminar Series 
1:00 PM - 2:00 PM
Location: Ward 5-230

Dr. Frederike Petzschner
Assistant Professor and Director of Brainstorm
Carney Institute for Brain Science
Brown University