CEREBRART - PAIN INFORMATION

Pain (an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential damage, or described in terms of such damage) gives nociceptive information to the brain about injuries, helps to survive and is probably far more complicated than the other perceptual modalities. The three stages of pain information transmission can be recognized. Firstly, pain information is generated using peripheral receptors (nociceptors). Secondly, transmission of pain information from the periphery to the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. Passage of pain information to higher brain centers, leading to the third stage of pain affect, motivation to reduce pain  and appropriate action. Humans do something because it gives them pleasure or because it helps to avoid pain.

So, pain information generates both sensations and motivations to act and is distributed to many brain areas, which reflects its tremendous evolutionary significance for survival. The central processing of pain information includes transmission to brain stem centers, where autonomic nervous system responses are recruited, to the limbic system, where the emotional components of pain are experienced, and to the cortex, where pain information is perceived and interpreted, It has been shown that painful stimuli activate a vast network of cortical areas, involved in the generation of painful percepts and including the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, the insula, posterior parietal cortex, anterior and mid-cingulate cortex, and parts of the prefrontal cortex. This CEREBRART work illustrates nociceptive regions in parasylvian cortex that are involved in processing pain information.