How Bud Craig's Insights Reshape the Research on Pain and Mind-Body Therapies

With his elegant studies, Bud Craig determined the structural neural basis for interoception and critically expanded our conceptual understanding of it. Importantly, he placed pain in the framework of interoception and redefined pain as a homeostatic emotion. Craig understood emotions and pain as experiences based on inferential brain processes within the theoretical model of prediction processing. This chapter aims to give a brief overview of relevant research. Mind-body therapies, such as meditation, mindfulness, yoga, Tai Chi, and others, are included as first-line non-pharmacological approaches in clinical guidelines for the management of chronic pain. Craig's groundbreaking work provided the background for our contemporary understanding of mind-body therapies and for the key role that interoceptive processes play in these therapies as they apply to a wide range of clinical conditions, including pain. This chapter reviews the tremendous influence that Craig's work had on the current state of research on mind-body therapies for managing chronic pain and how it led to new directions for cutting-edge clinical and neuroscientific research.

Keywords: Homeostatic emotion; Interoception; MAIA; Meditation; Mindfulness; Mind–body therapies.

PMID: 39436627 DOI: 10.1007/7854_2024_521