Keynote title: Pain, Emotion, and Body Schema

Abstract: I will discuss neural basis underlying pain and body schema perception. The first topic is about pain, especially the emotional aspect of pain. Pain is inseparable from the negative emotions, and emotions are inseparable from body’s autonomic/physiological responses. We find that different types of pain elicit both shared and distinct autonomic responses that can be quantitatively measured. Furthermore, we found that central neurons that change the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activities can modulate pain perception. The second topic is about brain’s representation of the body’s configuration in 3D space both during stationary poses and during actions. We conducted extensive in vivo recordings from sensorimotor cortices and the posterior parietal cortex while concurrently tracking the positions of all major joints and behaviors in freely moving mice. We developed an algorithm to compute all joint angles to parametrically describe body configurations. We discover that the different cortices use distinct reference frames to encode body posture and the cortex organizes postural representations based on actions.