Imagination is a principal human capacity, enabling simulation of sensations and situations for planning, learning, and empathy. We examined neural representations of experienced and imagined pain across eight body sites using deep-phenotyping, precision functional MRI with over seven hours of scanning per participant (N = 9). Here we show, using conventional mapping, pattern classification, and representational similarity analyses, that both imagined and experienced pain activated nociceptive regions (e.g., dorsoposterior insula) and non-nociceptive regions (e.g., premotor areas and inferior inter-effector motor cortex).
However, imagined pain did not reliably reactivate body site-selective nociceptive patterns in any region. Instead, imagined and experienced pain shared multivariate representations across widespread cortical and subcortical regions, particularly transmodal cortical areas including dorsomedial and lateral prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and thalamus. These findings suggest that imagination generates distributed pain-like activity, but with separable neural codes for imagined and experienced pain.
This distinction may explain the difficulty of vividly imagining pain and clarify its potential roles in empathy, planning, and pain chronification. We are grateful for assistance from Terry Sackett, Maryam Amini, Melanie Kos, Stephanie Sun, Eilis Murphy, Samuel Bergerson, Kristoffer Mansson, Sreekar Kasturi, Jason Davis, and Charles Mazof for assistance in data collection for this study. We thank Byeol Kim, Ben Graul, Li-Bo Zhang, and Zhaoxing Wei for comments on the manuscript, and Luke Chang and Marianne Reddan for insightful discussion.
This work was supported by a grant from the Hitchcock Foundation (to M.S. and T.D.W.) and National Institute of Mental Health grant R37MH076136 (to T.D.W.). Michael Sun, Bogdan Petre, Ke Bo, Sydney L. Wager Department of Psychology, University of Texas at Dallas, Richardson, TX, USA Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR, USA Correspondence to Michael Sun or Tor D.
Tor Wager serves on the scientific advisory board of Curable Health. All other authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
