FBS Colloquia No.306Laboratory of Science & Innovation for pain

Pain and Conciousness

Many clinicians describe pain as "consciousness".
In this lecture, I would like to discuss two aspects of consciousness and its relationship to pain.
First, awareness is sometimes used in the sense of focused attention.
Patients with chronic pain think only about their pain. In other words, their attention is focused to their pain. We would like to talk about a project in which we used a working memory task to create a state in which attention is not focused and captured the changes in the way pain is felt at that time.
Second, I would like to discuss the relationship between consciousness and pain, which is used to mean whether you are awake or asleep. We anesthesiologists learned about anesthesia through the concept of the three elements of anesthesia. The three elements are sedation (to reduce consciousness), analgesia (to relieve pain), and muscle relaxation.
Sedation and analgesia were once thought to be independent events, but it is becoming clear that this is not the case.
We would like to share our clinical research about our project on the relationship between "consciousness" and "pain," which have different meanings, and examine the mechanism of pain from a new perspective.