Retro- and Prospective Pain Encoded in the Resting Brain – an ICA approach

The brain is permanently active. Synchronized spontaneous oscillations occur across distributed brain regions and form an intrinsic network architecture that mirrors functional systems previously associated with sensory, motor, and cognitive tasks. But how plastic is this architecture? Intensive learning is accompanied by functional and structural changes in circumscribed brain regions. However the perceptual relevance of the intrinsic network architecture and its plasticity is unknown. Here we show short-term and long-term adaptations to repetitive painful perception in a bilateral intrinsic network of the human resting brain. We applied daily heat stimuli to healthy subjects across eleven days and studied a sensorimotor resting-state network (RSN) with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Resting-state fMRI (rs-fMRI) signal fluctuations in sensory cortices of the sensorimotor RSN preserve the level of subjective pain perception minutes after stimulation. By day eleven the connectivity of the whole network substantially increased and we found anticipatory coding in a prefrontal control region (vmPFC) involved in top-down modulation. The intrinsic activity in vmPFC before stimulation predicts the level of perceptual habituation as well as the connectivity of sensory cortices after stimulation. Our finding of a relation between perceptual learning and network plasticity emphasizes the relevance of intrinsic brain activity for perception and behaviour.