Chronic pain remains challenging to both diagnose and treat. These challenges, in part, arise from limited systems-level understanding of the basic mechanisms that process nociceptive information and ultimately instantiate a subjectively available experience of pain. Here, I provide a framework, the distributed nociceptive system, for understanding nociceptive mechanisms at a systems level by integrating the concepts of neural population coding with distributed processing. Within this framework, wide-spread engagement of populations of neurons produces representations of nociceptive information that are highly resilient to disruption. The distributed nociceptive system provides a foundation for understanding complex spatial aspects of chronic pain and provides an impetus for nonpharmacological cognitive and physical therapies that can effectively target the highly distributed system that gives rise to an experience of pain.

中文翻译：

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分布式痛觉系统：理解疼痛的框架

慢性疼痛在诊断和治疗方面仍然具有挑战性。这些挑战部分源于对处理伤害性信息并最终实例化主观可用的疼痛体验的基本机制的系统级理解有限。在这里，我提供了一个框架，分布式伤害感受系统，通过将神经群体编码的概念与分布式处理相结合，在系统层面理解伤害感受机制。在这个框架内，神经元群体的广泛参与产生了对破坏具有高度弹性的伤害性信息的表示。