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Survival requires prioritizing threats over pain. The authors identify a brain circuit in male mice, where fear signals from the cortex block pain-associated activation in the thalamus, revealing how fear suppresses pain and offering a potential target for therapies.

Natural variation in hecw-1 encoding an E3 ubiquitin ligase influences the avoidance of pathogenic bacteria by Caenorhabditis elegans and forms a molecular basis for behavioural variation.

This study shows that expectations about when a stimulus will occur systematically increase perceived intensity of pain and non-painful sensations, independent of actual delay or prediction errors, highlighting a core role of temporal expectations in perception.

This PrimeView accompanies the Primer on Low back pain by Vlaeyen and colleagues, and highlights the management of this condition.

Cluster headache is an excruciating, strictly one-sided pain syndrome, the treatment of which focuses on aborting attacks and preventing future attacks.

This PrimeView highlights how a diagnosis of neuropathic pain is reached, which is important to provide appropriate treatments.

Sensory neuron subtypes are defined by transcriptomics, but their proteomic identities remain unclear. Here, authors show distinct protein signatures of electrophysiologically defined nociceptors and implicate B3GNT2 in pain sensitization.

Back stroking rapidly calms human infants and mouse pups, markedly reducing movement. This shared response requires early-life maternal care and depends on hypothalamic Cav2.2 channel activity, linking caregiving to arousal regulation.

Paracrine signalling between tuft cells and enterochromaffin cells is a key mode of immune–sensory and gut–brain communication, and accounts for the pattern of gastrointestinal symptoms that occurs during parasite infections.

In mice, a circuit between the spinal cord and various regions of the brain, centring on spinal-cord-projecting neurons in the rostral ventromedial medulla, has a key role in driving chronic pain.

How animals detect external touch while their sensory organs are in constant motion remains unclear. Here, the authors show that specialized receptors in rat whisker follicles are structurally tuned to ignore self-motion and respond only to touch.

Psilocybin may help treat chronic pain, possibly due to direct analgesic effects. Here, authors tested psilocybin on acute and chronic pain in three mouse models of pain and found minimal effects on sensory, affective, or functional pain measures.

In this study, the authors find that ribonuclease 4 (RNase4)-expressing nociceptors, through RNase4, act as regulatory hubs that maintain peripheral nerve stability and coordinate nerve responses to injury, revealing a homeostatic role for nociceptors.

How the brain learns to link a sensory signal to a reward is not fully understood. Here authors show that two types of layer 5 neurons in sensory cortex contribute in different ways, helping the brain recognize relevant sensory cues and refine behavior accordingly.

Pacinian corpuscles play a major role in tactile sensation by detecting vibrations. Here, authors show through direct electrophysiological recordings that Pacinian corpuscles detect vibrations via the sensitivity of the nerve terminal in the corpuscle’s inner core to stimulus velocity.

Su et al. show that inflammatory arthritis pain stems from sustained interferon-driven MNK1/MNK2–elF4E signaling that sensitizes joint-innervating neurons. Blocking this pathway reverses pain, suggesting a targeted therapeutic strategy.

Lee et al. show that personalized brain-decoding models derived from intensive longitudinal fMRI data can track spontaneous pain in individuals with chronic pain, highlighting the potential of precise, patient-specific neuroimaging approaches.

How the brain maintains object representations during grasping, when complex sensory input rapidly changes, remains poorly understood. Here the authors show that object-identity signals shift and strengthen across sensorimotor cortex as reaching transitions to grasping.

Children born without a hand show early, widespread changes in brain maps, with body parts shifting across the homunculus. Adaptive behaviours explain individual differences but cannot override this early, deprivation-driven remapping.

Current tactile sensing solutions face challenges in excessive wiring, high energy demands of AI computing, and limitations in scalability and parallel processing. Here, the authors present a neuromorphic tactile system combining artificial skin and spiking hardware encodes touch with high accuracy at low power.

This study presents an HDB (horizontal diagonal band) – mPFC (medial prefrontal cortex) – thalamus circuit and the cholinergic signaling in mPFC Foxp2⁺ neurons in modulating sensory and affective pain in male mice.

Neural plasticity can be mediated by cognitive processes or sensory inputs to the brain. Cardin et al.use fMRI to study individuals who vary in hearing and sign language abilities, and find that sensory and cognitive experiences cause plasticity in anatomically and functionally distinguishable cortical areas.

TRPA1 ion channels act as thermosensors across different species; however, studies on their role in noxious cold sensation have provided conflicting results in mammals. Chen et al. show that these discrepancies arise because cold activates rat and mouse TRPA1 but not human or rhesus monkey TRPA1.

In animals, cryptochrome proteins are thought to be the detectors of the Earth's magnetic field, but humans have not been shown to posess mangetosensing capabilities. Foleyet al. demonstrate that the human cryptochrome protein, CRY2, when expressed in Drosophila melanogastercan mediate magnetoreception in a light-dependent manner.

Electrophysiological studies in some fish species suggest that proprioception is needed for fin movement. Here the authors test mechanosensory abilities of afferent nerves in pectoral fin rays, and find that the activity of fin ray nerve fibres reflects the amplitude and velocity of fin ray bending.

The vibrissa follicle is a blood-filled encapsulated mechano-transducer, the structure of which has been difficult to resolve. Here, Gerhardt et al. reveal 3D follicle-afferents architecture and accessorial structures by synchrotron X-ray tomography.

Previous work suggests that individual neurons in the lateral intraparietal area (LIP) can reflect specific learned associations. Here the authors find that individual LIP neurons can encode two completely different learned associations in two separate tasks. This suggests that LIP neurons can represent generic categorical outcomes.

Cortical states regulate behavior, but the network mechanisms underlying cortical states are unknown. Here the authors show that the desynchronized cortical state that occurs during active behavior is driven by an increase in thalamic firing independent of sensory input, which can be mimicked by optogenetic stimulation of the thalamus.

Genetic manipulation of skin peripheral sensory neurons in mice shows that cortical neuron responses to touch reflect subcortical mixing of signals from both rapidly adapting and slowly adapting low-threshold mechanoreceptors.

Sensory tuning properties of neurons in the secondary whisker somatosensory cortex (wS2) are not well understood. Here, the authors report that wS2 neurons supralinearly integrate concurrent multi-whisker input with larger temporal windows than primary somatosensory cortex.

In this study, the authors present an fMRI‑based signature of corticospinal connections, which predicts individual pain sensitivity, generalizes to patient cohorts, and tracks changes after brain stimulation, suggesting a biomarker to guide personalized pain care.

To investigate the sensory contributions of barrel cortex, the authors estimate spatiotemporal receptive fields by reverse correlation of multi-whisker stimulation to synaptic inputs. Complex stimuli revealed dramatically sharpened receptive fields, largely due to adaptation, and suggest the potential importance of surround facilitation through adaptation for discriminating complex shapes and textures during natural sensing.

Sensory cortex spiking is well known to predict trial-to-trial variability in perceptual choice, but the origins of this choice-related activity are not fully understood. In the mouse somatosensory system, electrophysiology, imaging and optogenetic experiments reveal a progression of choice-related activity as touch signals flow from primary afferents to cortex.

It is an open question whether choice signals in primary sensory areas have a causal influence on an animal’s perception. Here, the authors show that early sensory representations in the neocortex can be selectively manipulated to bias perception during discrimination behavior.

The processing of nociception in the somatosensory cortex (S1) has yet to be fully understood. Here, the authors demonstrate that the dysgranular region in S1 has an affinity for nociception and is critically involved in pain-like behavior.

During NREM sleep, spindles emerge from thalamocortical interactions. Here the authors carry out multisite thalamic and cortical recordings in freely behaving mice, to investigate the role of other non-classical thalamic sites in sleep spindle generation.

Two populations of neurons with distinct anatomy and receptor expression that convey information from the spinal cord to the brain have different functional properties with respect to touch and pain.

How the brain controls pain perception remains elusive. Here, authors show that layers 5 and 6 of the somatosensory cortex suppress or enhance nociception through cell-type-specific cortical and corticothalamic interactions.

Barrel cortex contains a functional map of whiskers but how neuronal activity maps multi-whisker inputs has not been studied. Here the authors show that while uncorrelated multi-whisker stimuli activate barrel neurons, correlated multi-whisker inputs activate neurons in a ring at the barrel-septa boundary

This study reveals how Tau pathology in spinal neurons contributes to early tactile deficits in Alzheimer’s disease, linking sensory dysfunction to cognitive decline. It highlights potential peripheral biomarkers and new therapeutic targets beyond the brain.

Control over pain changes how intense it is perceived. Here, the authors show that this effect results from increased expectation precision with control, which changes activity in brain regions relevant for motor-control, evaluating threat and modulating pain.

Activity in the superficial layers of the sensory cortex is believed to be largely driven by incoming sensory stimuli. Here the authors demonstrate how learning changes neural responses to sensations according to both behavioral relevance and timing, suggesting a high degree of non-sensory modulation.

A study using calcium imaging in the mouse forepaw system identifies neurons in the posterior insular cortex that respond to cooling and/or warming with distinct response dynamics.

The authors combine anatomical mapping, electrophysiological recordings, lesions, and pharmacological and optogenetic manipulations in rats to examine the role of forelimb somatosensory flow in the dorsolateral striatum in the learning and execution of motor habits.

Touch is an important sensory modality during social encounters. Here the authors report that during naturalistic social encounters in rats, the cortical activity in widespread areas at the level of single neurons is modulated by sociosexual characteristics such as the subject and partner sex.

Sensory neuronal circuits adapt during maturation when animals start to actively interact with the external world. The authors reveal structural and functional rearrangements of the input cortical interneurons receive around the time the animals start active sensation.

The parabrachial nucleus (PBN) projects to the amygdala, and contributes to affective aspects of neuropathic pain. Here the authors demonstrate that the lateral parabrachial nucleus (LPBN) contributes to hypersensitivity in a mouse model of neuropathic pain.

Sridhar et al. examine how electroacupuncture modulates brain activity and connectivity in fibromyalgia using pre- and post-treatment fMRI. They show that electroacupuncture engages somatosensory–insula circuits to link nociceptive-initiated pain with reduced nociplastic widespread pain.