#pain fluctuates over time. How does the brain make sense of these fluctuations? We show that sensory and motor regions in the brain encode and predict the "rhythm of pain" 🧵1/8 nature.com/articles/s4146…
We used a statistical learning task, in which healthy participants received probabilistic & volatile sequences of low and high pain stimuli and were asked to guess the probability of forthcoming low/high pain 2/8 
Behavioral performance was best described by an optimal Bayesian inference model with dynamic update of beliefs (an HMM) 3/8
The probabilistic prediction of low/high pain was encoded in sensorimotor cortical regions and dorsal striatum 4/8
Unexpected changes in stimulus frequencies drove the update of internal models by engaging neighboring premotor and posterior parietal regions, as well as prefrontal cortex 5/8
Why does it matter? 1. What we conventionally considered a ’sensory pain pathway’ is implicated in the generation of dynamic internal models of the temporal statistics of pain intensity 6/8
2. Temporal statistical learning generates endogenous expectations about pain. Given that expectations shape pain, temporal statistical learning might be central to endogenous pain control 7/8
Open data and code. Thanks to fantastic collaborators @zhang_suyi @benosaka and thanks to @NatureComms editors & reviewers who helped us improve the paper 8/8
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