December 6, 2010
He comes across as a full-blooded philosopher, with a bearded face and long grizzled hair, when one meets him. Despite his age, he displays a youthful, almost surprising, passion for science. His lab, called “Pain and Passions Lab”, seeks to understand the underlying mechanisms of pain with cutting-edge heavy duty apparatuses that he playfully calls “his million dollar toys.”
Dr. A. Vania Apkarian, a professor of physiology and anaesthesiology at Northwestern University, has researched pain for two decades. His lab employs a variety of non-invasive brain imaging techniques to understand pain perception in humans and animals.
Born in Syria, of Armenian descent, Dr. Apkarian spent his youth in Lebanon and came to the U.S to study electrical engineering . He stumbled into neuroscience through serendipity. He took a course where he learnt about the properties of the brain and their correlation with the electrical activity in the brain. This discovery triggered his passion for neuroscience, leading to a Masters in Biomedical Engineering, and, eventually, a Ph.D in Neuroscience. While history played draughts of violence in his nations of descent, Dr. Apkarian occupied himself in studying mechanisms of neurobiological and psychological origin in chronic pain patients.
Through his research, he has answered some key problems underlying chronic pain. His research shows that processing in cerebral cortex is fundamental to chronic pain perception instead of peripheral and spinal mechanisms. The cerebral cortex, occupying the bulk of our brain mass, plays a key role in sensory perception, cognition, speech, language, and motor skills. “The cortex interacts with everyday pain, it is both ‘influenced by’ and ‘influences’ the perception of pain,” says Dr. Apkarian.
Pain remains one of the key puzzles confronting the scientific world today. Until very recently, pain was seen as the symptom of a disease. Recent scientific advancement, however, brought a new perspective of pain in which chronic pain becomes the disease itself. Through Dr. Apkarian’s research, chronic pain may now be viewed as a memory of a painful experience trapped in the brain. This view deconstructs the way we understand pain and also our approach toward pain management.
According to the American Academy of medicine, “reduced productivity due to pain costs employers somewhere between $60 and $100 billion annually yet NIH barely spends 1% of its funding on research focused primarily on pain.” Pain research aims to reduce healthcare cost, increase productivity, improve quality of life, and, along the way, develop a clearer and more profound theoretical understanding of the brain.
As an engineer-turned-neuroscientist, Dr. Apkarian’s edge over other scientists in studying pain has been his technical expertise in methods and research tools. He has done pioneering work in the field in pain psychophysics, which studies the relation between the pain stimulus and the pain sensation. He rarely settles for the status quo. “In many ways, technology is an enabler, technology has been moving forward at an amazing pace and we have been able to do things that we never thought we would do," Dr. Apkarian says.
As a stickler for data-driven science, he believes that interpretation remains subservient to the process of measurements. “I am a scientist, if I have to understand anything it has to be mechanistic,” he says. “Science is measurements and numbers.”
Pain is a subjective experience. The element of subjectivity in pain renders many difficulties in quantifying pain. Dr. Apkarian approaches the brain as a complex matrix of circuits. “Brain is essentially a machine,” he says. “It computes, it calculates, it reacts, and it interacts in a staggeringly complex way.”
One of the fundamental ontological questions concerning consciousness involves the emergence of subjective consciousness in brain. “The grand problem in pain research is the link between subjectivity and brain,” he says. “How can a machine generate this subjective perception?”
As science answers deep questions about pain and the brain, it poses deeper questions, and this for Dr. Apkarian, keeps his passion alive and burning.
