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Pain and the PAG: learning from painful mistakes

Nature Neuroscience volume 17, pages 1438–1439 (2014)Cite this article

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Jeremy Bentham distilled animal behavior as avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. Now, using a combination of different methodological approaches, Roy et al. identify a neural mechanism relevant for learning to avoid pain.

Pain is evolutionarily old and shared among many species. None of us escapes experiencing this most fundamental of sensory and emotional percepts, which is clearly beneficial as our built-in alarm system, warning us of direct or impending injury. Oddly, we often only think of pain as the perceptual consequence of such injury and rarely do we make the link that the purpose of pain is to motivate decisions leading to action and behavioral change (for example, guarding an injured limb while tissue heals) and, moreover, to teach us what caused the pain in the first place so it can be avoided in future (for example, not touching a pan on a hot stove). In the healthy state, pain can therefore be considered a teaching signal that allows us to learn what kind of actions should be avoided for our own benefit, and it is this kind of learning process that an exciting study published in this issue of Nature Neuroscience investigates1. Here, Roy and colleagues1 highlight the relevance of the brainstem's periaqueductal gray matter as a region that is important for learning how to avoid pain.

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Figure 1: Main experimental findings and potential new directions for study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Falk Eippert and Irene Tracey are at the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain and Nuffield Division of Anaesthetics, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, England, UK.,

    Falk Eippert & Irene Tracey

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  1. Falk Eippert
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  2. Irene Tracey
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Correspondence to Irene Tracey.

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Eippert, F., Tracey, I. Pain and the PAG: learning from painful mistakes. Nat Neurosci 17, 1438–1439 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3844

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