Individual Differences in Pain Sensitivity Vary as a Function of Precuneus Reactivity

Although humans differ widely in how sensitive they are to painful stimuli, the neural correlates underlying such variability remains poorly understood. A better understanding of this is important given that baseline pain sensitivity scores relate closely to the risk of developing refractory, chronic pain. To address this, we used a matched perception paradigm which allowed us to control for individual variations in subjective experience. By measuring subjective pain, nociceptive flexion reflexes, and, somatosensory evoked brain potentials (with source localization analysis), we were able to map the brain’s sequential response to pain while also investigating its relationship to pain sensitivity (i.e. change in the stimulation strength necessary to experience pain) and spinal cord activity. We found that pain sensitivity in healthy adults was closely tied to pain-evoked responses in the contralateral precuneus. Importantly, the precuneus did not contribute to the actual representation of pain in the brain, suggesting that pain sensitivity and pain representation depend on separate neuronal sub-systems.