Brain Cells That Make Pain Unpleasant Identified

Now, a team of scientists at Stanford University has identified a bundle of brain cells in mice responsible for the latter — that is, the negative emotions of pain. Within the amygdala, they narrowed their search by looking for neurons in mice that were active during brief pain stimulation — such as a drop of hot, but not scalding, water applied to a paw. While bothering the mice, the researchers again monitored the basolateral amygdala pain ensemble, and here, too, the neurons remained subdued. Original Research: Open access research for “An amygdalar neural ensemble that encodes the unpleasantness of pain” by Gregory Corder, Biafra Ahanonu, Benjamin F. Grewe, Dong Wang, Mark J. Schnitzer, and Grégory Scherrer in Science. By means of time-lapse in vivo calcium imaging and neural activity manipulation in freely behaving mice encountering noxious stimuli, we identified a distinct neural ensemble in the basolateral amygdala that encodes the negative affective valence of pain.

Source: neurosciencenews.com