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Attention and Priming

Last updated: Sun, Mar 9, 2025

Attention is another cognitive function that interacts with pain. Pain is of course "designed" to get your attention. Researchers can expose experimental subjects to painful stimulation while they are in an fMRI scanner and can ask the subjects about the level of their pain. Such studies show that when subjects expect painful stimulation, they report more pain than if they don't expect it, and that if subjects are distracted at the time of painful stimulation, they report lower pain. The imaging results suggest that this phenomenon is explained by the PAG-RVM system in conjunction with the ACC, although the exact circuits involved aren't known.1

The flip side of this is that pain distracts attention from other things. It has also been found that focally applied brief painful stimulus generates a global suppression of spontaneous oscillations in somatosensory, motor, and visual areas, indicating that pain induces a widespread change in cortical function and excitability....2

In other words, pain insists on attention.