Neural Indicators of Individual Differences in Pain

On November 2, 2024, at 10:00 PM Beijing Time, Biolà hosted the 4th issue of the Bioneer First-Author Forum, featuring Dr. Libo Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Italian Institute of Technology. In his talk, “Neural Indicators of Individual Differences in Pain,” Dr. Zhang discussed two complementary lines of research investigating how neural activity captures individual variability in pain perception.

The talk distinguished two dimensions of individual pain perception—pain sensitivity and pain discriminability—corresponding broadly to absolute and difference thresholds in psychophysics. Across large EEG and fMRI datasets, Dr. Zhang and colleagues identified reproducible neural responses associated with these two dimensions: one line of work characterized neural indicators of pain discriminability across individuals, while another identified generalizable neuroimaging markers of pain sensitivity and used machine-learning approaches to predict individual pain sensitivity and intervention-related pain reduction. Together, these studies demonstrate that individual differences in pain perception can be captured by reproducible and, in important respects, modality-selective neural signatures.

We sincerely thank Dr. Libo Zhang for sharing this integrated perspective on his research with the Biolà community and for discussing how neuroimaging and electrophysiological approaches can contribute to a more individualized understanding of pain.

Citations:

Zhang, L.-B., Lu, X.-J., Huang, G., Zhang, H.-J., Tu, Y.-H., Kong, Y.-Z., & Hu, L. (2022). Selective and replicable neuroimaging-based indicators of pain discriminability. Cell Reports Medicine, 3(12). https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(22)00410-4

L.-B. Zhang, X.-J. Lu, H.-J. Zhang, et al. “ A Replicable and Generalizable Neuroimaging-Based Indicator of Pain Sensitivity Across Individuals.” Adv. Sci. 12, no. 44 (2025): e03373. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202503373