Where is Pain in the Brain? Revealing Neural Correlates of Pain as Orchestration of Allostatic Domain-General Patterns via fMRI at 7T

To date, fMRI has failed to distinguish an unambiguous and reliable signature that is unique to pain. Pain is accompanied by the activation of networks related to saliency processing. Employing the high sensitivity and spatial fidelity of 7T fMRI, we disentangle these overlapping representations. We apply stimuli that are perceived as painful and others that trigger saliency-related domain-general brain activity. Applying partial least square regression, we identify modality-specific characteristics in the way domain-general patterns are orchestrated relative to each other, revealing a large number of neurosignatures that are specific to the perception of pain.