Inaugural Lecture of Professor Ali Mazaheri

The Rhythm You Walk In With: Predicting Chronic Pain After Surgery

For twenty years, Professor Ali Mazaheri has studied the brain's intrinsic rhythms, the electrical waves it generates as it works. Ali began by asking how these rhythms shape attention and thought while the brain is active, and how they shift in people living with conditions that affect cognition, from attention and obsessive-compulsive disorders to the earliest stages of dementia. These shifts can mark vulnerability.

More recently, Ali has turned the same question from the working brain to the brain at rest. In this lecture, he will present evidence that the speed at which the brain idles reflects vulnerability to pain. He will argue that, measured before surgery, it can predict who goes on to develop chronic pain: a condition that affects a significant proportion of surgical patients and has no reliable cure. Recognising that risk in advance could allow us to protect these patients before the pain ever takes hold.