Lecture Theatre 5, at 7 Bristo Square
Top Down Before Bottom Up?
Predictive Processing – A Better way to Understand Pain?
Dr Mick Thacker PhD. MSc. Grad Dip Phys. Grad Dip MNMSD. HPC. FCSP.
Senior Consultant AHP (Pain), Guy's & St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust.
Senior Lecturer, Centre for Human and Aerospace Physiological Sciences. King's College London.
Deputy Lead, Pain Research Section, Neuroimaging. Institute of Psychiatry. Kings College London.
Adjunct Senior Research Fellow, School of Health Sciences. University of South Australia.
My talk will examine the potential for predictive processing (PP) to offer a better understanding of pain than traditional approaches based on afferent driven somatosensory processing. Traditional approaches see pain as a sensation produced directly by the activation of the peripheral nociceptive system. Whilst there is growing concern about the validity of this viewpoint there is no accepted contemporary alternative.
Here I will offer a brief overview of nociception and identify the key difficulties that arise from an acceptance that pain is the direct result of bottom up feature detection. I will use these paradigms to reason that PP (more especially action-orientated PP) offers a more plausible explanation for how pain is perceived and suggest that its application to the science of pain offers the potential to further our understanding of several unresolved/contentious arguments within the field.