Time: 4:00pm
Location: 46-3002, Singleton Auditorium (Third floor of MIT Building 46)

Title: Pain, Emotion, and Body Schema​​​​​​​

Abstract:

I will discuss the neural mechanisms underlying pain and body schema perception. In the first part, I focus on pain, particularly its emotional dimension. Pain is inseparable from negative emotions, and emotional states are tightly coupled to autonomic and physiological responses. We show that different types of pain elicit both shared and distinct autonomic response patterns that can be quantitatively measured. Moreover, we identify central neurons that shift the balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic activity and, in doing so, modulate pain perception.

In the second part, I examine how the brain represents the body’s configuration in three-dimensional space during both stationary postures and ongoing actions. Using extensive in vivo recordings from sensorimotor cortices and posterior parietal cortex (PPC), combined with full-body tracking of all major joints in freely moving mice, we find that PPC neurons encode postural features primarily in a body-midline reference frame, whereas sensorimotor cortices use a ground/gravity-based reference frame. Finally, we show that the cortex represents dynamic postural changes during different actions with distinct neuronal ensembles, whose neurons fire in phase-locked sequences that tile the entire action cycle.