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Ineffectiveness of tactile gating shows cortical basis of nociceptive signaling in the Thermal Grill Illusion

Ferrè, ER; Iannetti, GD; van Dijk, JA; Haggard, P; (2018) Ineffectiveness of tactile gating shows cortical basis of nociceptive signaling in the Thermal Grill Illusion. Scientific Reports , 8 , Article 6584. 10.1038/s41598-018-24635-1. Green open access

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Abstract

Painful burning sensations can be elicited by a spatially-alternating pattern of warm and cold stimuli applied on the skin, the so called "Thermal Grill Illusion" (TGI). Here we investigated whether the TGI percept originates spinally or centrally. Since the inhibition of nociceptive input by concomitant non-nociceptive somatosensory input has a strong spinal component, we reasoned that, if the afferent input underlying the TGI originates at spinal level, then the TGI should be inhibited by a concomitant non-nociceptive somatosensory input. Conversely, if TGI is the result of supraspinal processing, then no effect of touch on TGI would be expected. We elicited TGI sensations in a purely thermal condition without tactile input, and found no evidence that tactile input affected the TGI. These results provide further evidence against a spinal mechanism generating the afferent input producing the TGI, and indicate that the peculiar burning sensation of the TGI results from supraspinal interactions between thermoceptive and nociceptive systems.

Type: Article
Title: Ineffectiveness of tactile gating shows cortical basis of nociceptive signaling in the Thermal Grill Illusion
Location: England
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-018-24635-1
Publisher version: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-24635-1
Language: English
Additional information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Life Sciences > Div of Biosciences > Neuro, Physiology and Pharmacology
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10048053
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