• Karen D Davis, M Catherine Bushnell, Gian Domenico Iannetti, Keith St Lawrence, and Robert Coghill.
• Institute of Medical Science and Department of Surgery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, M5T 2S8, Canada ; Division of Brain Imaging and Behaviour - Systems Neuroscience, Toronto Western Research Institute, Toronto, ON, M5T 2S8, Canada ; Joint Department of Medical Imaging, University Health Network, Toronto, ON, M5T 2S8, Canada.
• F1000Res. 2015 Jan 1;4:362.

AbstractThe search for a "pain centre" in the brain has long eluded neuroscientists.  Although many regions of the brain have been shown to respond to painful stimuli, all of these regions also respond to other types of salient stimuli. In a recent paper, Segerdahl et al. (Nature Neuroscience, 2015)  claims that the dorsal posterior insula (dpIns) is a pain-specific region based on the observation that the magnitude of regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) fluctuations in the dpIns correlated with the magnitude of evoked pain.  However, such a conclusion is, simply, not justified by the experimental evidence provided.  Here we discuss three major factors that seriously question this claim.

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