Pain: The Weird Phenomenon of the Brain

Imagine your life without pain. No aching joints. No throbbing headaches. No stomach cramps. No toothaches. No stinging sunburns.

It might sound good, but in reality, having pain is much more important for survival. Pain protects us. When you touch a hot stove, you recoil in pain. That sensation helps you avoid getting a burn that could be dangerous — even deadly.

Pain is unpleasant, pain is scary — but pain can save our lives.

Pain is not just a message from injured tissues to be accepted at face value, but a complex experience that is thoroughly tuned by your brain.

Message sent:

Pain is a sensation, similar to smelling, hearing, tasting, touching and watching. However, the only difference is that all these senses tell us — what is happening in the world around you. While pain tells you what’s happening in the world within you — your body.

When you suffer an injury, the nervous system takes the responsibility of delivering the news to the brain. The nerve cells pick up a signal that something is wrong, and a network of nerve cells relay this message to the spinal cord. From there, it shoots up to the brain. The brain then translates the message and registers the feeling: Owww!

That’s the simple explanation, at least. There are still a lot of questions about how those messages travel and how the brain turns them into a “feeling.”

Message received:

The researchers have not yet answered the important question of how those messages are converted to what you actually ‘feel’ when you experience pain.

However, there are few symptoms which tell you about the cause of pain. Inflammation is one common example of this, it is a way that the body responds to cellular injury. Beyond pain, it often triggers swelling, redness and heat. But, there are many other chronic pain disorders, which have no easy explanation.

Pain memories:

Here we will learn about a surprising fact about the brain. When you make new memories or learn something new, your brain cells actually alter shape. The structure of the brain is totally different when you learn a math equation and when you listen to music.

It turns out that the same systems involved in learning and memory also are involved in sensing pain. In other words, pain changes in nerve cells. Those changes happen both in the brain and in the spinal cord. And they may last even after the initial trigger for pain vanishes.

Conclusion:

Finally, the weird science of Pain shows that pain is a volatile, complex sensation that is completely tuned by the brain. All of this has complicated “all in your head”.

If the brain controls all pain, does that mean that we can think pain away? Probably not, but we can always influence pain if we understand it.

Here I end this article with a quote from Angelina Jolie -

“ Without pain, there would be no suffering, without suffering we would never learn from our mistakes. To make it right, pain and suffering is the key to all windows, without it, there is no way of life.”