scholarly journals Central amygdala circuitry modulates nociceptive processing through differential hierarchical interaction with affective network dynamics

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabel Wank ◽  
Pinelopi Pliota ◽  
Sylvia Badurek ◽  
Klaus Kraitsy ◽  
Joanna Kaczanowska ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Brain Dynamics ◽  
Affective Processing ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Central Amygdala ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Kinase C ◽  
Nociceptive Processing ◽  
Hierarchical Interaction ◽  
Local Circuitry ◽  
Global Brain

AbstractThe central amygdala (CE) emerges as a critical node for affective processing. However, how CE local circuitry interacts with brain wide affective states is yet uncharted. Using basic nociception as proxy, we find that gene expression suggests diverging roles of the two major CE neuronal populations, protein kinase C δ-expressing (PKCδ+) and somatostatin-expressing (SST+) cells. Optogenetic (o)fMRI demonstrates that PKCδ+/SST+ circuits engage specific separable functional subnetworks to modulate global brain dynamics by a differential bottom-up vs. top-down hierarchical mesoscale mechanism. This diverging modulation impacts on nocifensive behavior and may underly CE control of affective processing.

scholarly journals How Do We Empathize with Someone Who Is Not Like Us? A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 362-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claus Lamm ◽  
Andrew N. Meltzoff ◽  
Jean Decety
Keyword(s):  
Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging ◽  
Affective State ◽  
Anterior Cingulate ◽  
Affective Processing ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Functional Magnetic Resonance ◽  
Resonance Imaging ◽  
Affective Stimuli

Previous research on the neural underpinnings of empathy has been limited to affective situations experienced in a similar way by an observer and a target individual. In daily life we also interact with people whose responses to affective stimuli can be very different from our own. How do we understand the affective states of these individuals? We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to assess how participants empathize with the feelings of patients who reacted with no pain to surgical procedures but with pain to a soft touch. Empathy for pain of these patients activated the same areas (insula, medial/anterior cingulate cortex) as empathy for persons who responded to painful stimuli in the same way as the observer. Empathy in a situation that was aversive only for the observer but neutral for the patient recruited areas involved in self–other distinction (dorsomedial prefrontal cortex) and cognitive control (right inferior frontal cortex). In addition, effective connectivity between the latter and areas implicated in affective processing was enhanced. This suggests that inferring the affective state of someone who is not like us can rely upon the same neural structures as empathy for someone who is similar to us. When strong emotional response tendencies exist though, these tendencies have to be overcome by executive functions. Our results demonstrate that the fronto-cortical attention network is crucially involved in this process, corroborating that empathy is a flexible phenomenon which involves both automatic and controlled cognitive mechanisms. Our findings have important implications for the understanding and promotion of empathy, demonstrating that regulation of one's egocentric perspective is crucial for understanding others.

scholarly journals In vivo evidence for a role of protein kinase C in peripheral nociceptive processing

2002 ◽  
Vol 135 (1) ◽  
pp. 239-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adriano L S Souza ◽  
Fabrício A Moreira ◽  
Karine R Almeida ◽  
Caryne M Bertollo ◽  
Karina A Costa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Protein Kinase C ◽  
Protein Kinase ◽  
Kinase C ◽  
Nociceptive Processing

scholarly journals The Role of Cingulate Cortex in Vicarious Pain

2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Esther H. Yesudas ◽  
Tatia M. C. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Affective State ◽  
Cingulate Cortex ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Affective Processing ◽  
Pain Processing ◽  
Motor Processing ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Experienced Pain ◽  
Clinical Disorders

Vicarious pain is defined as the observation of individuals in pain. There is growing neuroimaging evidence suggesting that the cingulate cortex plays a significant role in self-experienced pain processing. Yet, very few studies have directly tested the distinct functions of the cingulate cortex for vicarious pain. In this review, one EEG and eighteen neuroimaging studies reporting cingulate cortex activity during pain observation were discussed. The data indicate that there is overlapping neural activity in the cingulate cortex during self- and vicarious pain. Such activity may contribute to shared neural pain representations that permit inference of the affective state of individuals in pain, facilitating empathy. However, the exact location of neuronal populations in which activity overlaps or differs for self- and observed pain processing requires further confirmation. This review also discusses evidence suggesting differential functions of the cingulate cortex in cognitive, affective, and motor processing during empathy induction. While affective processing in the cingulate cortex during pain observation has been explored relatively more often, its attention and motor roles remain underresearched. Shedding light on the neural correlates of vicarious pain and corresponding empathy in healthy populations can provide neurobiological markers and intervention targets for empathic deficits found in various clinical disorders.

Distinct neuronal populations in the basolateral and central amygdala are activated with acute pain, conditioned fear, and fear-conditioned analgesia

2017 ◽  
Vol 661 ◽  
pp. 11-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan K. Butler ◽  
Sarah Ehling ◽  
Megan Barbar ◽  
Jess Thomas ◽  
Mary A. Hughes ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Acute Pain ◽  
Conditioned Fear ◽  
Central Amygdala ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Conditioned Analgesia

scholarly journals Capturing brain dynamics: latent spatiotemporal patterns predict stimuli and individual differences

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manasij Venkatesh ◽  
Joseph JaJa ◽  
Luiz Pessoa
Keyword(s):  
Short Term Memory ◽  
Spatiotemporal Patterns ◽  
Brain Dynamics ◽  
Experimental Conditions ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Saliency Maps ◽  
Spatially Distributed ◽  
Activation Data ◽  
Brain Data ◽  
Low Dimensional

AbstractInsights from functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), and more recently from recordings of large numbers of neurons through calcium imaging, reveal that many cognitive, emotional, and motor functions depend on the multivariate interactions of neuronal populations. To capture and characterize spatiotemporal properties of brain events, we propose an architecture based on long short-term memory (LSTM) networks to uncover distributed spatiotemporal signatures during dynamic experimental conditions1. We demonstrate the potential of the approach using naturalistic movie-watching fMRI data. We show that movie clips result in complex but distinct spatiotemporal patterns in brain data that can be classified using LSTMs (≈ 90% for 15-way classification), demonstrating that learned representations generalized to unseen participants. LSTMs were also superior to existing methods in predicting behavior and personality traits of individuals. We propose a dimensionality reduction approach that uncovers low-dimensional trajectories and captures essential informational properties of brain dynamics. Finally, we employed saliency maps to characterize spatiotemporally-varying brain-region importance. The spatiotemporal saliency maps revealed dynamic but consistent changes in fMRI activation data. We believe our approach provides a powerful framework for visualizing, analyzing, and discovering dynamic spatially distributed brain representations during naturalistic conditions.

scholarly journals Topographic gradients of intrinsic dynamics across neocortex

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Golia Shafiei ◽  
Ross D. Markello ◽  
Reinder Vos de Wael ◽  
Boris C. Bernhardt ◽  
Ben D. Fulcher ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Processing ◽  
Neural Activity ◽  
Brain Regions ◽  
Affective Processing ◽  
Network Embedding ◽  
Microarray Gene Expression ◽  
Neuronal Populations ◽  
Haemodynamic Activity ◽  
Topographic Gradients ◽  
Temporal Feature

AbstractThe intrinsic dynamics of neuronal populations are shaped by both macroscale connectome architecture and microscale attributes. Neural activity arising from the interplay of these local and global factors therefore varies from moment to moment, with rich temporal patterns. Here we comprehensively characterize intrinsic dynamics throughout the human brain. Applying massive temporal feature extraction to regional haemodynamic activity, we estimate over 6,000 statistical properties of individual brain regions’ time series across the neocortex. We identify two robust topographic gradients of intrinsic dynamics, one spanning a ventromedial-dorsolateral axis and the other spanning a unimodal-transmodal axis. These gradients are distinct in terms of their temporal composition and reflect spatial patterns of microarray gene expression, intracortical myelin and cortical thickness, as well as structural and functional network embedding. Importantly, these gradients are closely correlated with patterns of functional activation, differentiating cognitive versus affective processing and sensory versus higher-order cognitive processing. Altogether, these findings demonstrate a link between microscale and macroscale architecture, intrinsic dynamics, and cognition.

scholarly journals Resting Brain Fluctuations Are Intrinsically Coupled to Visual Response Dynamics

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michaël E Belloy ◽  
Jacob Billings ◽  
Anzar Abbas ◽  
Amrit Kashyap ◽  
Wen-Ju Pan ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reticular Formation ◽  
Visual Stimulation ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Brain Dynamics ◽  
Brain State ◽  
Visual Response ◽  
Response Dynamics ◽  
Sensory Stimuli ◽  
Prominent Component ◽  
Global Brain

Abstract How do intrinsic brain dynamics interact with processing of external sensory stimuli? We sought new insights using functional magnetic resonance imaging to track spatiotemporal activity patterns at the whole brain level in lightly anesthetized mice, during both resting conditions and visual stimulation trials. Our results provide evidence that quasiperiodic patterns (QPPs) are the most prominent component of mouse resting brain dynamics. These QPPs captured the temporal alignment of anticorrelation between the default mode (DMN)- and task-positive (TPN)-like networks, with global brain fluctuations, and activity in neuromodulatory nuclei of the reticular formation. Specifically, the phase of QPPs prior to stimulation could significantly stratify subsequent visual response magnitude, suggesting QPPs relate to brain state fluctuations. This is the first observation in mice that dynamics of the DMN- and TPN-like networks, and particularly their anticorrelation, capture a brain state dynamic that affects sensory processing. Interestingly, QPPs also displayed transient onset response properties during visual stimulation, which covaried with deactivations in the reticular formation. We conclude that QPPs appear to capture a brain state fluctuation that may be orchestrated through neuromodulation. Our findings provide new frontiers to understand the neural processes that shape functional brain states and modulate sensory input processing.

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