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Asked by evilevo to Dalya, Derek, Sarah, Tim, Tom on 19 Jun 2011.
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Dalya Soond answered on 14 Jun 2011:
It’s a physical process that works on the brain…so you were right on both counts!
Your body is filled with pain receptors that can sense when there is an injury or illness. They will make you feel the physical sensations of pain (much like you can normally feel the physical sensations of touch). And t hese receptors send messages to neurons in the brain that make you feel the psychological discomfort of pain.
These unpleasant signals together will help you change your behaviour to protect yourself from further injury…For instance, if you have sprained your ankle and you feel pain, you will stay off your leg and prevent you from damaging it further.
There is actually a rare genetic condition called ‘congenital insensitivity to pain’ where people lack pain receptors and they get the most awful injuries because they don’t know when they have hurt themselves and they also never learn to avoid dangers like a hot stove. I remembering hearing about how one kid with this disease bit off his own tongue and didn’t even know it.
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Sarah Thomas answered on 14 Jun 2011:
Yes it is a physical process but I do think that sometimes your brain thinks there is pain before you feel it. Like when you bash into something and you say “ouch!” like you are expecting pain but then nothing happens and it is actually ok! I think the pain is often a reflex that your body uses to protect itself from injury.
I had an operation on my right hand in March and when they finally took my cast off in May my right thumb was completely dead and I couldn’t feel a single thing! I kept whacking it off stuff because I was forgetting it was there! It’s because they removed some of my nerves when they did the operation. But the nerves grew back and I started to get feeling in it again, but then it went the opposite way and everything HURT! Even touching cotton wool made my thumb hurt. The nerves around my scar became hyper-sensitive and they thought everything was pain, but it wasn’t. The only way to fix it was to touch lots of different textures with my thumb and massage around the scar to de-sensitise the nerves. It was so strange! I remember sitting in the physio with an electric tooth brush with tears running down my face as the vibration on the scar was agony! But it’s all better now 🙂 🙂 🙂
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Tim Millar answered on 14 Jun 2011:
As mentioned its a bit of both.
The body uses “nociceptors”, nerves which pick up stimuli and feed that information back to the brain. There are two types of nerve fibre the Adelta and the C fibre. The speed at which nervous impulses travel along these fibres gives us either sharp stabbing pain (Adelta) or dull, long lasting aching pain (C).
Once this information reaches the brain it undergoes processing in the thalamus and cerebral cortex before being controlled by signals from the hypothalamus. There are nerves which travel down from the brain (decending inibitory fibres) which can reduce the feeling of pain from the initial stimulus. The body also produces opium like compounds called endorphins which reduce the sensation and even cause euphoria, a feeling of extreme pleasure.
There is also the phantom limb syndrome. People who have had an amputation of a limb sometimes have pain which is described in the limb that is no longer there. Although there is some information being sent from the amputated region, the brain percieves this as coming from the detached limb suggesting that there is a great deal of brain involvement in the processing and perception of pain. Some pioneering work was done in this field using mirrors. Patients were asked to look at their other limb in a mirror so it looked as if they still had both limbs. Phantom limb pain in the hand often feels like the hand is sqeezing really tightly. So the patients were asked to do this with their good hand and watch it in the mirror. Then they unfolded their hand and the phantom pain went away. This is because the eyes make the brain believe that the amputated hand is still attached and by “seeing it” unfold, the perception of the processing of the information coming from the hand must be wrong. So the brain turns off the pain signal by sending down those endorphins.
So there is a lot of physical and brain involvement
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Derek McKay-Bukowski answered on 14 Jun 2011:
The biologists have cleaned this one up. I’m just reading what they wrote… excellent stuff!
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Tom Crick answered on 19 Jun 2011:
It is a response to a stimulus, so it is a physical process in which a nerve impulse is transmitted to your brain and this interprets it as pain.
Question for you: if this is the case, do you think it is possible to make the brain ignore pain?
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