Imagined Pain Fails to Reactivate Body-Site-Selective Nociceptive Patterns of Real Pain
AnnaCiaunica · x · 2026-10-16
A shared neuroscience finding shows that merely imagining pain does not selectively reactivate the body-site-specific nociceptive patterns observed during real pain experience.
The accompanying figure illustrates the contrast: real pain produces localized, somatotopic activation at the affected body site, while imagined pain yields diffuse activity lacking this site selectivity. The result challenges strong 'simulation' accounts of mental imagery and pain, and is relevant to embodied cognition and cognitive modeling research.
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