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1 University of Oxford
Brief radiant laser pulses can be used to activate cutaneous A
and C nociceptors selectively, and elicit a number of transient brain responses (laser-evoked potentials, LEPs) in the ongoing electroencephalogram. LEPs have been used extensively in the past 30 years to gain knowledge about the cortical mechanisms underlying nociception and pain in humans, by assuming that they reflect, at least in part, neural activities uniquely or preferentially involved in processing nociceptive input. Here, by applying a novel blind source separation algorithm (Probabilistic Independent Component Analysis) to 124-channel event-related potentials elicited by a random sequence of nociceptive and non-nociceptive somatosensory, auditory, and visual stimuli, we provide compelling evidence that this assumption is incorrect: LEPs do not reflect nociceptive-specific neural activity. Indeed, our results indicate that LEPs can be entirely explained by a combination of multimodal neural activities (i.e. activities also elicited by stimuli of other sensory modalities) and somatosensory-specific, but not nociceptive-specific neural activities (i.e. activities elicited by both nociceptive and non-nociceptive somatosensory stimuli). Regardless of the sensory modality of the eliciting stimulus, the magnitude of multimodal activities correlated with the subjective rating of saliency, suggesting that these multimodal activities are involved in stimulus-triggered mechanisms of arousal or attentional reorientation.
This article has been cited by other articles:
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  U. Baumgartner and R.-D. Treede Are There Nociceptive-Specific Brain Potentials? J Neurophysiol, November 1, 2009; 102(5): 3073 - 3074. [Full Text] [PDF]
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A. Mouraux, L. Plaghki, and G. D. Iannetti Are There Nociceptive-Specific Brain Potentials? Reply to Baumgartner and Treede J Neurophysiol, November 1, 2009; 102(5): 3075 - 3076. [Full Text] [PDF]
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V. Legrain, C. Perchet, and L. Garcia-Larrea Involuntary Orienting of Attention to Nociceptive Events: Neural and Behavioral Signatures J Neurophysiol, October 1, 2009; 102(4): 2423 - 2434. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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M. Moayedi and I. Weissman-Fogel Is the Insula the "How Much" Intensity Coder? J Neurophysiol, September 1, 2009; 102(3): 1345 - 1347. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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 M. C. Lee, A. Mouraux, and G. D. Iannetti Characterizing the Cortical Activity through Which Pain Emerges from Nociception J. Neurosci., June 17, 2009; 29(24): 7909 - 7916. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]
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