SpacePain Lab
ions | Bruxelles Woluwe, Louvain-la-Neuve
The ability to perceive pain is crucial for survival, it can indeed be seen as a warning signal allowing to detect and to react against stimuli that have the potential to inflict tissue damages. But pain is also a major healthcare issue as its treatment constitutes a very problematic challenge for physicians. Because of its aversive quality and its high prevalence, chronic pain affects the quality of life of millions of individuals and imposes a severe financial burden upon our societies. Therefore, progress in understanding the biological, psychological and social mechanisms of pain in humans is not only important for basic research, but also critical for the development of effective strategies for the diagnosis and management of pathological pain conditions.
The objective of our group is to study the neurophysiological mechanisms underlying the cognitive aspects of pain. More specifically, we study the ability of the brain to prioritize the processing of painful stimuli (selective attention), to locate (spatial perception, body representation, multisensory interaction) and to plan actions against them in order to protect the body against physical damages (motor control, nociceptive reflexes). We also investigate how cognitive factors can modulate pain, induce analgesia (hypnosis, cognitive control) and influence nociceptive brain plasticity (central sensitization), in both healthy volunteers and patients (complex regional pain syndrome, fibromyalgia).
Several techniques are used: neurophysiology (electroencephalography, evoked potentials, electromyography, transcranial magnetic stimulation), psychophysics (threshold measurement, mental chronometry) and neuropsychology (congenital blindness, chronic pain, hemispatial neglect, etc.).