Attention and Interoception Alter Perceptual and Neural Pain Signatures-A Case Study.

Introduction: Fluctuations 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 and its interplay with other dimensions of experience. Methods: Our method measures, dynamically and at home, 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. Results: We 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. Conclusion: 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.

An interhemispheric frontoparietal network supports hypnotic states.

Understanding the neural substrate of altered conscious states is an important cultural, scientific, and clinical endeavour. Although hypnosis causes strong shifts in conscious perception and cognition, it remains largely unclear how hypnosis affects information processing in cortical networks. Here we manipulated the depth of hypnotic states to study information processing between cortical regions involved in attention and awareness. We used high-density Electroencephalography (EEG) to record resting-state cortical activity from 30 hypnosis experts during two hypnotic states with different depth. Each participant entered a light and a deep hypnotic state as well as two well-matched control states. Bridging top-down and lateralisation models of hypnosis, we found that interhemispheric frontoparietal connectivity distinguished hypnosis and control conditions, while no difference was found between the two hypnotic states. Using a graph-theoretic measure, we revealed that the amount of information passing through individual nodes (measured via betweenness centrality) is reduced during hypnosis relative to control states. Finally, we found that theta power was enhanced during hypnosis. Our result contributes to the current discussion around a role for theta power in bringing about hypnotic states, as well as other altered conscious states. Overall, our findings support the notion that altered top-down control in frontoparietal regions facilitates hypnosis by integrating information between cortical hemispheres.

Sensory Target Detection at Local and Global Timescales Reveals a Hierarchy of Supramodal Dynamics in the Human Cortex.

To ensure survival in a dynamic environment, the human neocortex monitors input streams from different sensory organs for important sensory events. Which principles govern whether different senses share common or modality-specific brain networks for sensory target detection? We examined whether complex targets evoke sustained supramodal activity while simple targets rely on modality-specific networks with short-lived supramodal contributions. In a series of hierarchical multisensory target detection studies (n = 77, of either sex) using EEG, we applied a temporal cross-decoding approach to dissociate supramodal and modality-specific cortical dynamics elicited by rule-based global and feature-based local sensory deviations within and between the visual, somatosensory, and auditory modality. Our data show that each sense implements a cortical hierarchy orchestrating supramodal target detection responses, which operate at local and global timescales in successive processing stages. Across different sensory modalities, simple feature-based sensory deviations presented in temporal vicinity to a monotonous input stream triggered a mismatch negativity-like local signal which decayed quickly and early, whereas complex rule-based targets tracked across time evoked a P3b-like global neural response which generalized across a late time window. Converging results from temporal cross-modality decoding analyses across different datasets, we reveal that global neural responses are sustained in a supramodal higher-order network, whereas local neural responses canonically thought to rely on modality-specific regions evolve into short-lived supramodal activity. Together, our findings demonstrate that cortical organization largely follows a gradient in which short-lived modality-specific as well as supramodal processes dominate local responses, whereas higher-order processes encode temporally extended abstract supramodal information fed forward from modality-specific cortices.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Each sense supports a cortical hierarchy of processes tracking deviant sensory events at multiple timescales. Conflicting evidence produced a lively debate around which of these processes are supramodal. Here, we manipulated the temporal complexity of auditory, tactile, and visual targets to determine whether cortical local and global ERP responses to sensory targets share cortical dynamics between the senses. Using temporal cross-decoding, we found that temporally complex targets elicit a supramodal sustained response. Conversely, local responses to temporally confined targets typically considered modality-specific rely on early short-lived supramodal activation. Our finding provides evidence for a supramodal gradient supporting sensory target detection in the cortex, with implications for multiple fields in which these responses are studied (e.g., predictive coding, consciousness, and attention).

Melatonin suppression does not automatically alter sleepiness, vigilance, sensory processing, or sleep.

Presleep exposure to short-wavelength light suppresses melatonin and decreases sleepiness with activating effects extending to sleep. This has mainly been attributed to melanopic effects, but mechanistic insights are missing. Thus, we investigated whether two light conditions only differing in the melanopic effects (123 vs. 59 lx melanopic EDI) differentially affect sleep besides melatonin. Additionally, we studied whether the light differentially modulates sensory processing during wakefulness and sleep. Twenty-nine healthy volunteers (18-30 years, 15 women) were exposed to two metameric light conditions (high- vs. low-melanopic, ≈60 photopic lx) for 1 h ending 50 min prior to habitual bed time. This was followed by an 8-h sleep opportunity with polysomnography. Objective sleep measurements were complemented by self-report. Salivary melatonin, subjective sleepiness, and behavioral vigilance were sampled at regular intervals. Sensory processing was evaluated during light exposure and sleep on the basis of neural responses related to violations of expectations in an oddball paradigm. We observed suppression of melatonin by ≈14% in the high- compared to the low-melanopic condition. However, conditions did not differentially affect sleep, sleep quality, sleepiness, or vigilance. A neural mismatch response was evident during all sleep stages, but not differentially modulated by light. Suppression of melatonin by light targeting the melanopic system does not automatically translate to acutely altered levels of vigilance or sleepiness or to changes in sleep, sleep quality, or basic sensory processing. Given contradicting earlier findings and the retinal anatomy, this may suggest that an interaction between melanopsin and cone-rod signals needs to be considered. Clinical Trial Registry: German Clinical Trials Register, DRKS00023602, https://www.drks.de/drks_web/navigate.do?navigationId=trial.HTML&TRIAL_ID=DRKS00023602.

Attentional modulation of neural dynamics in tactile perception of complex regional pain syndrome patients.

Body perceptual disturbances are an increasingly acknowledged set of symptoms and possible clinical markers of complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS), but the neurophysiological and neurocognitive changes that underlie them are still far from being clear. We adopted a multivariate and neurodynamical approach to the analysis of EEG modulations evoked by touch to highlight differences between patients and healthy controls, between affected and unaffected side of the body, and between "passive" (i.e., no task demands and equiprobable digit stimulation) and "active" tactile processing (i.e., where a digit discrimination task was administered and spatial probability manipulated). When correct identifications are considered, an early reduction in cortical decodability (28-56 ms) distinguishes CRPS patients from healthy volunteers. However, when error trials are included in the classifier's training, there is an unexpected increased decodability in the CRPS group compared with healthy volunteers (280-320 ms). These group differences in neural processing seemed to be driven by the affected rather than the unaffected side. We corroborated these findings with several exploratory analyses of neural representation dynamics and behavioural modelling, highlighting the need for single participant analyses. Although several limitations impacted the robustness and generalizability of these comparisons, the proposed analytical approach yielded promising insights (as well as possible biomarkers based on neural dynamics) into the relatively unexplored alterations of tactile decision-making and attentional control mechanisms in chronic CRPS.

Prostheses as extensions of the body: Progress and challenges.

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the incorporation of artificial limbs. This research promises to provide individuals with sensorimotor disorders such as amputations with prostheses which feel like their own body part. While neuroscience made a leap towards uncovering the basic neurocognitive mechanisms of bodily self-consciousness, the development of incorporated prosthetic limbs still faces substantial challenges in basic neuroscience and in clinical reality. Here we critically examine recent findings on prosthesis incorporation to aid patient rehabilitation in the context of advances in cognitive and applied neuroscience as well as technology. To this end, we integrate results from fundamental and clinical neuropsychological research to outline how several crucial milestones will have to be passed to achieve the self-attribution of prostheses to one's own body. We further discuss the implications of these results for clinical treatment and patients' quality of life.