SOMAPS – Multilevel systems analysis and modeling of SOmatosensory, Memory, and Affective maPs of body and objects in multidimensional Subjective space
www.somaps.eu
Project leader: Prof. Dr. Herta Flor
Staff: Dipl.-Psych. Jens Foell, Dipl.-Psych. Robin Bekrater-Bodman
Funded by the European Union (EU 043432)
The SOMAPS project is an international association of researches from different fields who are concerned with the interaction between physical stimuli, physiological processes in the brain and subjective responses. Neuropsychologists, physicists and engineers from Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and Spain exchange their results and expertise in order to create and evaluate new methods for the assessment and analysis of the processing of physical stimuli.
The research group at CIMH is building on studies which have shown that non-painful tasks can elicit subjective pain responses if different levels of perception are given conflicting input. For example, the subject moves the right hand and holds the left hand still, when at the same time a mirror construction gives the impression that both hands are moving simultaneously (McCabe, C.S., Haigh, R.C., Halligan, P.W., & Blake, D.R. (2005): Simulating sensory-motor incongruence in healthy volunteers: implications for a cortical model of pain. Rheumatology, 44, 509-516).
The results of the SOMAPS project are interesting for a large number of different application areas. The experiments about neuronal plasticity regarding the processing of multi-modal tasks, which are the main focus for the CIMH research group, are primarily relevant for the investigation of phantom pain and its cure. In this field, there have already been successful trials using mirrored hand movements as described above (Ramachandran, V.S., Rogers-Ramachandran, D., & Cobb, S. (1995): Touching the phantom limb. Nature, 377, 489-490).
By using functional MRI scans and modern 3-D technology for the measuring of the body surface, this research is working to answer the following questions:
- How can the painful responses during non-painful tasks with conflicting multi-modal feedback be explained on a neurophysiological level?
- What are the neurophysiological differences between persons that show a differing vulnerability for this kind of pain response?
- How can these painful responses be reduced?
- Which new methods can be useful in this context?
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