Attention and pain: merging behavioural and neuroscience investigations.

Modern neuroscience is providing novel ways to measure the effects of pain. Engagingly, some of its techniques provide pictorial representations of brain activity, enabling the easy communication of complex processes. This new representationalism seems to promise great hope for the future of pain research. We are persuaded of the scientific benefits that might result by those passionate about these new methods. However there are some concerns that have not been adequately discussed, and there is caution that should be exercised as these investigations develop. With any new method there is always a danger of scientific isolationism as the reference field of the investigation narrows; sometimes, in the worst of cases, leading to the methodological tail wagging the theoretical dog (Beaulieu, 2003). Of course, methodolotry is neither new, nor inevitably unhelpful in science; however, untempered it can create what we have come to think of as a paradigmatic ‘velvet rut’ in which re-discovery and the translation of old ideas into a new ‘objective’ language can become the newly celebrated outputs. There are historical lessons. At the end of the 19th Century, chronometry, the measurement of response times to perceptual stimuli, had provided a basis for a new scientific psychology (Wundt, 1896), taking it beyond the self-report of experience (Titchener, 1898). However, early chronometry remained ghettoed in a structuralism concerned largely with ‘what happens where and when’ (Angell, 1907). It was only with the rise of a functional psychology, interested in ‘how and why’ behaviour occurs, that chronometry could be put to use in developing behavioural models (Danziger, 1990). As the neurocentric age unfolds we should ensure that these historical lessons are learned (Zimmer, 2004). We run the risk of developing parallel fields of inquiry into central mechanisms of pain that differ only epistemologically. Neuroscience studies of attention to pain have developed in parallel with behavioural science studies of attentional interruption. A stronger science will be developed by intertwining both strands. Neuroscience studies of attention using techniques such as event related potentials (ERPs), positron emission