Functional integration within the human pain system as revealed by Granger causality

Pain is a unique and highly subjective sensory experience which, more than any other sensory experience requires the integration of sensory, contextual and motor processes. Accordingly, the complex experience of pain is subserved by an extended network of brain areas. However, the functional integration among these brain areas, i.e. how they interact and communicate to generate a coherent pain percept and an adequate behavioral response is largely unknown. Here, we used magnetoencephalography to investigate functional integration among pain-related cortical activations in terms of Granger causality and compared…