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Pain is a complex phenomenon. Some people who have terrible injuries report very little pain while others develop terrible pain following a very minor event. This suggests that pain is not related only to the degree of physical injury and as such, other processes must contribute to the experience of pain.

Recent research into bodily perceptions and sensory information processing suggests that people with chronic pain have dysfunctions in relation to the painful body part. Importantly, these dysfunctions are related to mal-adaptive changes that occur in the brain. So what if we target the brain in our treatment by targeting these dysfunctions? One way to target some of these perceptual and sensorimotor dysfunctions is by using illusions. 

So the question remains, can illusions work to re-calibrate bodily perceptions and do they have an effect on cortical reorganization? And more importantly, can they affect pain? This talk will provide a general overview of pain processing, perceptual and sensory dysfunctions, and cortical changes in people with pain. It will also present novel research on the use of illusions in pain.