PSYC 302 Lecture Notes - Lecture 13: Fibromyalgia, Spinothalamic Tract, Neural Coding
16 Dec 2017
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Slide 38: two important theories that in the field since the field began (really 4 theories but can be grouped into 2 types). There are still pain researchers who take sides. Pat well and ron melzack would study pain but no one identified themselves as pain researchers. Theory championed by ed perl : o. Specificity theory: there are neurons that are specific for coding pain information and because they are specific for pain, if you give an innocuous stimulus, these neurons will not fire, won"t be excited. On y-axis, is neuron"s firing rate and on x-axis, is the intensity of the stimulus applied and whether this stimulus is innocuous or noxious. He says that once a stimulus becomes noxious, these neurons will begin to fire and that the more noxious a stimulus, the higher the firing intensity. Eventually, you will get to a point where the neurons will not fire any faster and as such will plateau. o.
