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Lundbeck Foundation grant to Professor Yury Shtyrov

No words can describe the pain – or can they? Professor Yury Shtyrov receives a Lundbeck Foundation grant to study neural interactions between nociception and language.

Professor Yury Shtyrov, CFIN / Aarhus University

How do we communicate our pain to others? This challenge is faced daily by pain sufferers and doctors worldwide. Neuroscientifically, this question is linked to understanding the brain mechanisms of pain perception, on one hand, and those of encoding and storage of word meanings, on the other one. We use words to describe pain, deliver medical diagnoses and treatment information.

Strikingly, language can influence pain perception (which is well-known from placebo and nocebo effects) while pain itself can affect word comprehension. These interactions are poorly understood and highly complex.

To unravel them and bridge the gap between fundamental questions in neuroscience of language and in pain research, a new joint project between CFIN and Pain & Cognition Neuroimaging Lab at Melbourne University will investigate the brain dynamics of acquiring pain-related words.

The project is supported with 240,000 DKK granted by the Lundbeck Foundation to Professor Yury Shtyrov from CFIN for research activitieis at both Aarhus University and University of Melbourne in 2024-2025.

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