Attention and interoception alter perceptual and neural pain signatures

Abstract

AbstractFluctuations of chronic pain levels are determined by a complex interplay of cognitive, emotional and perceptual variables. We introduce a pain tracking platform composed of wearable neurotechnology and a smartphone application to measure and predict chronic pain levels. Our method measures, dynamically, pain strength, phenomenal and neural time series collected with an online tool and low-density EEG. Here we used data from a single participant who performed an attention task at home for a period of 20 days to investigate the role of attention to different bodily systems in chronic pain. Our results show a relationship between emotions and pain strength while allocating attention to the heartbeat, the breathing, the affected or the unaffected limb. We found that pain was maximal when attending to the affected limb, and decreased when the participant focused on his breathing or his heartbeat. These results provide interesting insights regarding the role of attention to interoceptive signals in chronic pain. We found power changes in the delta, theta, alpha and beta (but not in the gamma) band between the four attention conditions. However, there was no reliable association of these changes to pain intensity ratings. Theta power was higher when attention was directed to the unaffected limb compared to the others. Further, the pain ratings, when attending to unaffected limb, were associated with alpha and theta power band changes. Overall, we demonstrate that our neurophysiology and experience tracking platform can capture how body attention allocation alters the dynamics of subjective measures and its neural correlates. This research approach is proof of concept for the development of personalized clinical assessment tools and a testbed for behavioural, subjective and biomarkers characterization.