Pains, gains, and midbrains.

O ne of the main aims of neuroscience is to understand how the CNS deals with and adapts to external inputs and internal events. The altered molecular and cellular events form a basis for abnormal processing that underlies physiopathological events. Understanding these events can allow translation from bench science to the patient, and a key step in this process is using models of a clinical condition in animals and human volunteers. Pain is an example of an area where this process has reached a high level of sophistication and where the route from the bench to the patient is starting to be mapped out. The article by Iannetti et al. in this issue of PNAS (1) is a wonderful example of how an imaginative and well planned imaging study can build on findings from animals to help explain the complex mechanisms of pain and its modulation in humans.