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Physical Pain and Emotional Pain Use Same Brain Networks
Antipater writes "To the brain, heartbreak and emotional torment are no different from having hot coffee spilled on your hand, reports CNN. They cite a recent study from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which 40 recently-dumped men and women underwent fMRI scans while having their arm burned or being shown a picture of their ex. The stimuli produced nearly identical brain reactions."
...scientists found to be dreaming up bizarre study purely to satisfy their own schadenfreude.
but the same brain you are talking about has a "would you rather" processor - and mine would rather suffer an emotional heartbreak than a boot to the head
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
Goes to show how crude our current scanning techniques are.
I've burned my hand before and the sensation was quite different from being dumped.
Not to say it's magic or not in the brain. Just saying fMRI isn't accurate enough to detect the difference. There most certainly is a difference.
Okay, this isn't really related, but it does show that emotional pain can lead to severe physiological effects:
Broken Heart Syndrome (wiki link)
Emotional stress can trigger a cardiomyopathy which can kill (possibly from stress-released levels of adrenaline). In fact (quoting from wikipedia), mortality rates in general show that in the year following a loved one's death, women are twice as likely to die than normal, and men 6 times more likely.
(Though this may have a lot to do with the widower effect.
I read about this a year or so ago, probably on Slashdot even.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
What about the brain activity when your ex burns your arm?
Emotional and physical pain feel different to you, don't they? That means they feel different to your brain. I'm certainly not denigrating this study - it's interesting - but the link to the CNN summary is not fit for nerds. The article's title makes such an irrational claim that it should not be considered for further reading. The journal article's authors realize that a good fMRI scan gets hundreds of thousands of neurons per voxel at best. Even if the data were identical (they weren't) it only means is that physical and emotional pain don't look different in the average of a large functional group of brain cells. fMRI will get you the coarse activity of a brain regions, but not a neural correlate of conscious experience.
He once inserted random mutations into his code, just so he could have the experience of debugging.
Does this mean we can claim self defense for murdering someone who jilted us since our brain physically can't tell the difference between the emotional hurt and real hurt?
All MRIs look the same...
So why oh why is there no morphine for my heart?
Sometimes Physical pain triggers an emotional response (say, if you were abused as a child, and as an adult, someone hits you, reminding you of the abuse you suffered before). Sometimes Emotional pain triggers a physical response (broken heart syndrome). It's not as clear cut as saying "This is physical, this is emotional, and there are strict limits on how they occur."
Since only a masochist would agree to participate in such an experiment, the results may not be applicable to the general population.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What showed up on the MRI when the subjects lost their internet connection?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
If this article tickles your fancy about just what's going on inside the human mind, may I suggest the wonderfully engaging set of lectures on human behavior given by Ropert Sapolsky as part of the Stanford University online lectures available at iTunes U.
heartbreak and emotional torment are no different from having hot coffee spilled on your hand
If you've seen the price of coffee at Starbucks recently, spilling some would definitely be grounds for feeling emotional trauma.
Have gnu, will travel.
I went in for some unexplained pain (later linked to an allergy) and the doctor asked me if I had any stress emotional or otherwise. He said the two can often be linked to physical sensations. I of course handle the latter fairly well most of the time and I responded with the following tune, "Ooo eeee, oooo aaaah aaaah, I went to see the witch doctor and he told me what to do...."
He wasn't exactly amused, but some levity never hurt any situation.
It's like the scientist where like "oh, sorry to hear about your breakup. You know what would make you feel better? Let me burn the shit out of your arm and study your brain. Had enough burning? Here is a picture of your ex to look at. What's that? Oh no, it only seems that she's wearing nothing but my lab coat in that picture.. your prob hallucinating form that lsd we gave you earlier."
If what I just said sounded like a troll, it was probably just a failed attempt at humor.
How does this explain how masochists feel pleasure from physical pain, but do feel hurt from emotional pain.
Think of pain in a psychological, adaptive sense, where it's an undesirable stimulus that lessens the chance we will perform some kind of behavior again. I think that's what is being picked up by an MRI. Not the immediate reflex that causes you to pull your hand away from the glowing red thing on the stove, but the part that causes it to hurt afterward, leaving a strong memory of the situation.
However, I did have a psychology professor last quarter tell the class you can lessen the effect of a break-up by taking pain medication. He said that most anti-inflammatory medications are believed to affect a certain part of the brain, which is incidentally the same place triggered by a break-up. He told us this right after Valentine's day, apologizing for not getting to that point in the curriculum a day sooner.
But I've actually been through a lot or relationships. Everything from one-night stands to one-week stands to three-month torrid affairs to engagement to even one marriage. And I've had a lot of injuries (two shootings, about a dozen stab wounds, gone face-first through 2 windshields, caught on fire twice, etc. ; I've been in a lot of fights [including the knife fights, whether I had a knife or not...and, yes, I came out on top in all of those or I'd be dead], not all of which I won [but the majority of them I did, but when I lost, I lost pretty badly...most real fights are over in less than 10 seconds, regardless of what Hollywood would have you believe], combat, you name it).
And while a one-night or one-week stand going bad isn't a big deal, finding out that the women that you've fallen in love with over the past 3 months to 3 years is either (a) leaving or (b) done something so off-the-reservation that you can't stand to have her around anymore, love or no love, is more painful than any injury I've ever sustained. Hell, I carried a torch for 12 years for one woman (and even got back together with her when we met up again after about 11 or those years), and it almost drove me insane when I broke up with her for the second time. Something that no amount of physical pain has ever driven me to, that experience almost did. It took me about 10 months to get to the point where I realized that everything bad I saw coming out in her (self-centered, inconsiderate, unwillingness to concede that she might be wrong no matter what evidence was stacked against her, unreasonable demands, etc.) that caused me to break up with her 12 years ago had changed from simple flaws to dominant personality traits in the intervening time. Until I realized that, I dreamed about her, wrote about her (one of my hobbies is writing), and she was never far from my thoughts (except for the rare times that I was with someone else who ensnared my heart the way she had, and none of those lasted longer than a few years).
I would most definitely say that (and other similar events) that is far more painful to me than getting shot, stabbed, or caught on fire. Physical pain is nothing compared to the hell that one's emotions and attachments can put one through. Think about it - when torturing someone, it's often far more effective to work on their emotions and mind than it is to cause them physical injury. Ask any vet whether waiting for something bad to happen (pre-battle jitters, being in a precarious position, walking into a potential ambush) is worse than anything that happens to you when the shoe drops. Everyone I know (and I can't think of a single man in my family that I know of that hasn't served in the military at one time or another, and in every single war of the past 100 years in many cases) that's been in those situations will tell you that your mind can do worse things to you than anything else.
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
I would like to know where I can sign up to perform such experiments on people and get away with it.
That should read "Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists Who Are Assholes".
Reminds me of one of the opening scenes from Ghostbusters. "The effect? I'll tell you what the effect is: it's pissing me off!"
Read the poetry of Shakespeare, Rumi, Chaucer, Keats, Coleridge, Goethe, Wordsworth, Rilke, Tennyson, Eliot (I could go on), and the same theme arises: poets have known this for ages and have patiently waited in their graves for science to catch on. It is a very ordinary sort of knowledge, based on near-universal experience. I just think the poets do a far better job of expressing it.
Development is programmable; Discovery is not programmable. (Fuller)
There's a definite trend in this thread of people saying they'd prefer physical pain to emotional pain. And yet our society looks at corporal punishment like something from an alien planet. "Cruel and unusual," and all that. Caning a thief? Unimaginable. But putting him in a cage for a number of years, subjecting him to degradation and humiliation? That's CIVILIZATION, baby.
Seems like we ought to admit that the reason we don't use physical punishment on criminals is not because of some moral imperative but because imprisonment actually hurts more.
Emotional Pain lasts forever while physical pain is mostly temporary.
That article wasn't too bad, with control groups and such. Right up to the point where it blurted out "Participants rated how they felt after each task trial using a five-point scale, with lower numbers reflecting more distress".
WTF? Involving the subjectivity of the target in the measurement process is an instant indicator of poor science. Hell, I'd lie just to bugger up the results of a crappy experiment like that.
If they'd stuck to just measuring specific objective things, it may have had some merit. FFS, don't any medical people know about the scientific method?
so he is. Read the Bible and you would "discover" things a lot earlier.
The man has written a couple of books about the role that the mind plays in back pain. When the book first came out it was pretty revolutionary. Now the ideas are pretty widely accepted as being fairly obvious. The man has not said that ALL back pain is related to the mind. However he has laid out a very plausible hypothesis to explain how the mind uses chronic pain to distract itself from deeply repressed emotions.
Psychiatrists know, for example, that certain painkillers can be effective in treating some symptoms of emotional distress, and in lessening the pain of rejection, isolation, or loss.
For the person who posted the WTF? response, this is an important result because it means that mechanisms for dealing with physical pain can also address some aspects of emotional pain (although as I've pointed out, it wasn't really a new result, but confirmation of something we already knew).
Good question. You go first.
Hasn't this already been done at least 2 years ago?
I'm pretty sure I read somewhere (possibly PopSci SciAm, or maybe Nat'l Geographic) that emotional pain looks exactly the same as physical pain in an MRI in 2009 or so.
Sorry for not linking. I'll look it up and see if I can find corroborating evidence or a counter to my gangrenous mind.
Hectice, baby, Mercator says hello to you
... violence doesn't hurt.
Compared to emotional pain, I totally agree.
Balls (or head) usually don't start to hurt again when you remember you were kicked some time ago.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I mean... hey... this gets to be "proven medical fact", we might as well may start giving out guns and shovels to emotionally sensitive people.
Also, it becomes A-OK to ram someone off the road if they annoy you.
And just think of all wonderful implications to self-harming yet externally induced emotions like jealousy?
Either Kevlar-yellow will become the new black, or we'll start putting antidepressants into drinking water.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Physical pain and emotional pain are very clearly distinguishable sensations, even if they feel similar. That means that they are not using identical pathways. Because the pathway and the experience are just two sides of the same thing. Identical pathways = identical experience. Since the experiences are not at all identical, the pathways cannot be.
There might be a lot in common. But they are not the same.
--
make install -not war
I'm no expert, but my impression is that pretty much all all fMRI studies, certainly the ones reported in the popular press, are bullshit. My reasons: 1) fMRI records traces of oxygen metabolism, not neural action potentials; 2) it can not distinguish between metabolism in neurons and glia and 3) it requires integration of signals on the order of seconds. It *does* result in pretty brain pictures and gives us all the warm fuzzies about thinking we know something about how the brain works when we really don't. Any experts please refute.
This is news? I've taken over-the-counter pain remedies for emotional pain for decades. And why do they think opiates are attractive to people who become addicts? Duh.
E Proelio Veritas.
Maybe they left you because even their daddy complexes wouldn't keep them around a psycho like yourself.
Stress kills.
Common knowledge I believe...
...will break my bones but words will never hurt me. :-(
In other words, the brain doesn't appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain.
Isn't this a flawed assumption? Maybe what they're looking at in the brain, when physical pain occurs, is the *emotional* reaction to the physical pain (ie. distress). So when purely emotional pain is felt, the same areas light up.
I mean do they know for sure that the brain signals they're seeing for physical pain are just that - signals for physical pain? You'd have to then ask, why would the brain wave a flag to say "my arm hurts" it there wasn't a reason for it - and that reason being to provoke a strong reaction to attend to the cause of the hurt. That is, an emotional reaction.
So it seems to me the two are kind of linked anyway. You feel distress when in pain. Surprise. So why shouldn't there be similar or related signals going on when feeling purely emotional distress?
A grad student sharing an apartment with 5 other grad students, not sure if he's gonna have enough money for his monthly allotment of Ramen
Windows assumes you are an idiot...Linux demands proof.
And? People are neurologically linked to each other the same way an addict is linked to a substance. A stimulus is a stimulus, if it causes the brain to release neurotransmitters, it will eventually create dependence. So, the experiment is misleading. It implies that *withdrawal* and pain coincide. 'Emotional pain'? What does that even mean? The study is spun.
This goes a long way towards confirming a substantial element of my own psychological model (c. 2007, John-Paul Miller, "A Unified Model of the Human Psyche", isbn 1435700678).
In the Post 9/11 aftermath in New York, I was struck by my inability to reconcile the sheer stupidity of many of the responses... yet people aren't really stupid... so I dug deeper looking to resolve the contradiction between what people know if they stop to think about it and their actual behavior.
Once I made the connection (which arose from neural network projects in software) that the almost all of our brain activity is pattern based, I was able to use physical analogies (such as learning to hit a baseball, or a baby learning to stand up or walk) as parallels to help explain how emotional distress occurs and growth is accomplished.
Basically, I set out to build a model which is true for all people all the time and explains emotional stimulus, perception, response, dysfunction, and growth. I ended up using physical activities as parallel analogies, and ultimately arrived at a complete functional model that describes in practical terms how we function emotionally. So far I haven't been able to break the model, and I've been trying to prove it wrong for nearly 10 years now.
It's interesting to see research that shows the connection is more than that "they are similar".
My theory is that there is a one-to-one correspondence between our emotional state and our experiences. For each experience we can encounter, there is a discrete emotional state. This is possible because emotions are produced by neurotransmitters, whose discrete values in combination are able to produce enough discrete emotions to represent each and every possible experience. So by modulating our neurotransmitter levels we can have every possible experience, since emotion := experience. This can be done through drug therapy, hypnosis, religious bafflegab, brainwashing etc. In fact, the whole universe could be an emotional experience dreamed up by our psychological state.
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