The Gate Theory of Pain Revisited: Modeling Different Pain Conditions with a Parsimonious Neurocomputational Model

Figure 10

Modeling wind-down pain: after 50 iterations of standard training epochs, signals from nociceptive receptors become very intense. From iterations 50 to 100, the gate circuit, instead of receiving different stimuli like in previous cases, receives an intense nociceptive stimulus of value 1. For testing pain responses to other types of stimuli during the phase of intense nociceptive stimulation, all types of plasticity (synaptic and intrinsic) are blocked from iterations 100 to 150 (this procedure was not done in previous examples). As seen, after a long intense pain stimulation, the circuit becomes less responsive to all types of stimuli.