A new study by researchers from the University of Essex, in collaboration with the University of Ludwig Maximilian in Munich, Germany, revealed that each person's brain has a unique pain fingerprint, varying from person to person.
More so, to find the results of the study, researchers examined 70 participants' data, then the experiments were divided into two studies using certified lasers to generate pain.
The study found that rapidly fluctuating brain waves associated with short pain, can vary significantly in scans.
In general, researchers discovered that gamma wave signals were remarkably stable and created similar individual patterns when stimulated.
According to Senior lecturer at the department of Psychology Dr Elia Valentini, they found significant differences in the timing, frequency and location of gamma oscillations and some people showed no waves at all.
Dr Valentini added that not only can they identify the extreme variability in gamma response across individuals, but also show that the individual response pattern is stable over time, and this pattern of collective variation and individual stability may apply to other brain responses, and its characterization may allow us to identify individual pain fingerprints in brain activity.
Moreover, Dr. Valentini noted that previous findings on the relationship between pain and gamma oscillations did not represent all participants. Adding that unfortunately, this minority can lead research results and lead to misleading conclusions about the functional importance of these responses, not that the fluctuations of these waves have no role in perceiving pain, but certainly will not find their real role if it's they're continued to be measured like this so far.
However, researchers hope that this study will change the way gamma oscillations are measured in other sensory areas.
It was previously thought that these waves, called gamma oscillations, represented the perception of pain in the brain, where previous research focused on the group's data and overlooked individual differences, even ignoring them as noise in scans.
Source: Qatar News Agency