New emotional circuit discovered in the brain relates to pain
The neuroscience around the brain and pain (symptoms) keeps evolving and our understanding continues to grow and change as more new evidence comes forth. Today I want to share some of this new evidence from a study done at the Salk Institute. The article states:
“Researchers at the Salk Institute have now identified a brain circuit that gives physical pain its emotional tone, revealing a new potential target for treating chronic and affective pain conditions such as fibromyalgia, migraine, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Published on July 9, 2025, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study identifies a group of neurons in a central brain area called the thalamus that appears to mediate the emotional or affective side of pain in mice. This new pathway challenges the textbook understanding of how pain is processed in the brain and body.”
I have been talking for a long while how chronic pain (and especially neuroplastic symptoms) are more related to emotion than just sensation (physical component). This study “discovered a new spinothalamic pathway in mice. In this circuit, pain signals are sent from the spinal cord into a different part of the thalamus, which has connections to the amygdala, the brain’s emotional processing center. Pain processing is not just about nerves detecting pain; it’s about the brain deciding how much that pain matters,” says first author Sukjae Kang, a senior research associate in Han’s lab.
The researcher Han says “overactivation of the spinothalamic pathway may contribute to these conditions by making the brain misinterpret or overreact to sensory inputs.” The article states that “many chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia and migraine involve long, intense, unpleasant experiences of pain, often without a clear physical source or injury. Some patients also report extreme sensitivity to ordinary stimuli like light, sound, or touch, which others would not perceive as painful.” This is what we call sensitization and it’s a brain and central nervous system effect.
Research like this is so enlightening because it proves that chronic pain (and especially neuroplastic symptoms) have a relationship to the emotional circuitry in the brain, not just physical issues or just the physical sensations themselves that are the issue. It’s the emotional circuitry that decides the intensity of the symptom, the unpleasantness of the symptom, and how much it bothers or scares us. As Han says: “Our discovery of the affective (emotional) pain pathway gives us a molecular and circuit-level explanation for the difference between detecting physical pain and suffering from it.”
The emotional suffering is something that becomes front and center in chronic pain and neuroplastic symptoms. It makes sense that it plays a big part in the symptom and it’s great that they discovered a new neural pathway to prove this. We now need to translate this understanding into practice and work to reduce the emotional activity in the brain to help reduce the neuroplastic symptom.
