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."

Comments

Re:Bad scans

[c0lo]

Goes to show how crude our current scanning techniques are.

That'n no true. What is however true is the /.-ers seldom read TFA.

I've burned my hand before and the sensation was quite different from being dumped.

Now, form the second FA:

a network of brain regions that support the aversive quality of physical pain (the “affective” component), principally the dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC) and anterior insula (AI), also underlie the feeling of social rejection. In contrast, the brain regions that support the somatic representation of physical pain, and are most closely aligned with the “sensory-discriminative” component—including the operculo-insular region [i.e., secondary somatosensory cortex (S2) and dorsal posterior insula (dpINS)]—are not activated by social rejection and do not factor into current theorizing about the neural overlap between social rejection and physical pain (1, 2).

Translation: yes, the main areas activated in "affective pain" and "physical pain" are different.

As plausible as this rationale is, here we suggest an alternative: that the neural overlap between social rejection and physical pain is more extensive than current findings suggest. Specifically, we propose that experiences of social rejection, when elicited powerfully enough, recruit brain regions involved in both the affective and sensory components of physical pain.

Which, applied to your case, seems to indicate that your feeling of social rejection was not powerful enough. That... hints a bit about you or the strength of your relation, isn't it?