Many Infants born preterm often spend their first weeks of life in neonatal intensive care (NICU), where they are exposed to repeated noxious clinical procedures. To understand how to manage pain on the NICU and its long-term effects on the development of the individual we need to quantify the personal pain experience and study how the brain processes and is affect by pain. In his talk, Dr Fabrizi will describe new ways to quantify the severity of each clinical procedure and how to use this information to draw an individual pain history profile. He will then show evidence of how, during early development, brain changes are reflected in cortical sensory function transformations. In particular, he will go over the complex relationship between pain related brain activity and behaviour describing a new method to map nociceptive brain activity across time and space (microstate mapping). Dr Fabrizi will argue that this new approach has allowed him to demonstrate that neonatal behavioural differences are related to changes in how the brain processes a noxious stimulus. This will open a debate about what we actually know of how the brain receives and handles sensory information during the lifespan.