Pain is ‘individual’
Do you cringe when you visit the doctor for an injection, or perhaps the thought of having a tooth removed at the dentist makes you uncomfortable? Neuroscientists are now reportedly using scanning technologies to see how the brain processes pain.
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Do you cringe when you visit the doctor for an injection, or perhaps the thought of having a tooth removed at the dentist makes you uncomfortable? Neuroscientists are now reportedly using scanning technologies to see how the brain processes pain.
According to scientists, how you think about pain can have a major impact on how it feels.
The Wall Street Journal reports studies at Stanford University’s Neuroscience and Pain Lab allow people to watch their own brains react to pain in real-time and learn to control their responses.
The studies find when the subjects distract themselves from the pain, they have more activity in the higher-thinking parts of their brains.
According to Sean Mackey, chief of the division of pain management at Stanford, scientists are “starting to understand the brain basis of how they work, and how they work differently from each other”.
The way a person perceives pain is “highly individual”, experts say, adding heredity factors, stress, anxiety, fear and depression contribute to how the varying strengths of pain are tailored to the individual.
The Wall Street Journal also reports motivation plays a “huge role” in how people perceive pain, using the example of a wounded soldier who can ignore his own pain to save his fellow comrades, while someone who is depressed may feel incapacitated by a minor sprain.
Do you cringe at the sight of a needle? Describe your ‘pain levels’ by commenting in the box below.
