Anybody who's tried to concentrate on work while suffering a headache knows that pain compellingly commands attention,which is how evolution helped ensure survival in a painful world.
Now, researchers have pinpointed the
brain region responsible for pain's ability to affect cognitive processing. They have found that this pain-related brain region is distinct from the one involved in cognitive processing interference due to a distracting memory task.
Ulrike Bingel and colleagues at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf published their discovery in the July 5, 2007 issue of the journal Neuron, published by Cell Press.
To search for the region responsible for pain's ability to usurp attention, the researchers asked volunteers to perform a cognitive task involving distinguishing images, as well as a working memory task involving remembering images. The researchers asked the volunteers to perform the tasks as they experienced different levels of pain caused by the zapping of their hands by a harmless laser beam.
During these tests, the volunteers, brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In this widely used analytical technique, harmless magnetic fields and radio waves are used to scan the brain to determine blood flow across regions, which reflects brain activity.
The researchers, experiments identified a brain region called the lateral occipital complex (LOC) as the cognitive-related area affected by both ,working memory load, and pain. This finding was expected, since the LOC is known to be involved in processing images.