Pain through the lens of active inference: 02 October 2024

Pain through the lens of active inference

This lecture takes a fresh look at pain and exercise rehab through the lens of active inference. Active inference is a unifying explanatory framework for perception, attention, cognition and action. Importantly, for clinicians, an active inference perspective flips our understanding of how the nervous system operates. According to this perspective, pain doesn’t live in the tissues, nor in the brain. Rather, pain emerges from the delicate dance between precision-weighted, bottom-up, sensory information and your (largely unconscious) top-down predictions.

In this engaging and interactive webinar Dr. Mervyn Travers PhD will explore key components of the active inference framework (including predictive processing, precision weighting and competition between sensory streams) and discuss their implications for clinicians tasked with helping people living under the dark cloud of persisting pain. He will outline the rationale and evidence base for this approach and future directions for clinical practice.

Learning objectives:

• To understand pain through the lens of active inference and the implications for clinical practice
• To consider the fit-for-purpose model for the treatment of chronic pain
• To reframe our treatment targets to align with the interplay of top-down predictions and bottom-up sensory evidence in the generation of pain 

Accreditation:

Two Accreditation point have been awarded by Kwaliteitshuis Fysiotherapie.

Faculty: Dr. Merv Travers

Language of Instruction: English 🇬🇧