26Previous research has observed that individuals with chronic pain demonstrate slower alpha band 27 oscillations (8-12 Hz range) during resting electroencephalography (EEG) than do age-matched, healthy 28 controls. While this slowing may reflect pathological changes within the brain that occur during the 29 chronification of pain, an alternative explanation is that healthy individuals with slower alpha 30 frequencies are more sensitive to prolonged pain, and by extension, more susceptible to developing 31 chronic pain. To formally test this hypothesis, we examined the relationship between the pain-free, 32resting alpha frequency of healthy individuals and their subsequent sensitivity to two experimental 33 models of prolonged pain, Phasic Heat Pain and Capsaicin Heat Pain, at two testing visits separated by 8 34 weeks on average (n = 61 Visit 1, n = 46 Visit 2). We observed that the speed of an individual's pain-free 35 alpha oscillations was negatively correlated with sensitivity to both prolonged pain tests and that this 36 relationship was reliable across short (minutes) and long (weeks) timescales. Furthermore, we used the 37 speed of pain-free alpha oscillations to successfully identify those individuals most sensitive to 38prolonged pain, which we also validated on data from a separate, independent study. These results 39suggest that alpha oscillation speed is a reliable biomarker of prolonged pain sensitivity with the 40 potential to become a tool for prospectively identifying pain sensitivity in the clinic. 41