Seeing Your Pain
Learning to consciously alter brain activity through MRI feedback could help
   control pain and other disorders 
From: Technology Review - July/August 2006 - page 70
By: Emily Singer

Christopher deCharms, a neuroscientist and founder of Omneuron, a startup
company in Menlo Park, CA. He has spent the last five years developing
imaging techniques that can be used to teach patients to control their brain
activity. Changes in neural activity usually take place unconsciously, as
different parts of the brain are engaged to perform tasks or process stimuli.
Neurons in the language circuit start firing, for example, when you have a
conversation with a friend. When you watch a scary movie, neurons in the
amygdala, an area involved in emotion, fire more frequently. But consciously
controlling these changes -- damping activity in specific brain regions --
could theoretically be useful for treating not only pain but such diseases as
depression or even stroke. Exerting that kind of control is difficult, but it
may offer an alternative to drugs that is both more precise and less likely
to cause side effects.  

Until a few years ago, selective control of brain activity was just a
provocative idea. But a new version of functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI) has, for the first time, made brain activity visible in real time. The
technology was just what deCharms needed. He and his collaborator Sean
Mackey, associate director of the Pain Management Division at Stanford
University, have already shown that their technique works, at least in the
short term. In December, they published the results of their first study in
the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showing that
both healthy subjects and chronic-pain patients could learn to control brain
activity -- and pain -- using real-time fMRI. 

Read the entire article at:
http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?id=17058&ch=biotech

Photo:
http://www.technologyreview.com/articlefiles/17058-Singer%20071206%20FMRI.jpg

Photo caption:
Learning to consciously regulate brain activity in the insula (shown in
yellow) could help patients control chronic pain. 

Links:
Omneuron
http://www.omneuron.com/

Control over brain activation and pain learned by using real-time functional
   MRI 
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/102/51/18626

Think Away the Pain
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,69887,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2
http://www.wired.com/news/avantgo/story/0,2278,69887-,00.html

Pain News and Updates
http://pain-news.blogspot.com/

Sean Mackey
http://paincenter.stanford.edu/faculty/mackey.html

Stanford Pain Management Center
http://paincenter.stanford.edu/

The Strain in Pain Lies Mainly in the Brain
http://paincenter.stanford.edu/research/index.html