Meet Our Postdocs: Dan-Mikael Ellingsen And The Neurophysiology Of Touch

February 18, 2016

 

Dan-Mikael Ellingsen

Postdoctoral fellows are in many ways the backbone of the MGH Martinos Center: young investigators whose work plays a significant role in advancing current studies while also setting the stage for the next generation of research. We checked in with one of our postdocs, Dan-Mikael Ellingsen, to ask about his research interests, what attracted him to the Martinos Center, and what he’s been up to since he arrived. Here’s what we learned.

Among the questions he’s seeking to address: How do expectations and social context shape the ways in which we experience touch and pain?

“I did my PhD in neurophysiology at the Univ. of Gothenburg, Sweden,” he said, “in a research group that has a strong foundation in the neurophysiology of touch—especially affective and social touch. As I learned more about the neuroscience of affect and pain, I soon realized that, despite the fascinating “bottom-up” system of skin fibers that detect and transmit touch information to the brain, I was more interested in how these affective experiences are shaped by “top-down” influences, such as expectations and contextual meaning (e.g., an identical touch stimulus can be pleasant or unpleasant depending on expectations, who is touching, etc.).

"I did some experiments with healthy volunteers, investigating placebo effects on pleasant touch versus pain, and cross-sensory influences between affective visual (emotional faces) and tactile (different types of touch), using techniques such as fMRI, pupillometry, HRV and pharmacological manipulation with oxytocin.”

The Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging seemed a natural fit for his interests, not least because of its strong work in the area of pain

“Besides the methodological expertise at the center, I was attracted to the Center for Integrative Pain NeuroImaging (CiPNI) led by Dr. Vitaly Napadow. I found their research in basic and clinical pain neuroimaging very innovative. And they also collaborate closely with a broader network of placebo researchers in Boston (PIPS), which opened up valuable collaborations for me.”

He is putting real doctors and pain patients in adjoining MRI scanners—at the same time—so he can study how they interact

“During my PhD studies, I became increasingly fascinated by the profound effects the therapeutic relationship can have on health outcomes. At Martinos, I am working on a project to understand the processes in the brains of clinicians and patients, during the therapeutic interaction, which leads to such placebo-like clinical improvement. To investigate this, we have real clinicians and pain patients positioned in two different MRI scanners while they can interact 'face-to-face' via a video/audio link. While in the scanners, they participate in an experimental proxy of a clinical treatment encounter, where the clinician is allowed to use a device to relieve the patient of experimentally applied pain. All this goes on while we record brain and autonomic activity of both participants simultaneously (often called 'hyperscanning').”