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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."
A lot of inspiration can be found in seemingly bizarre experiments.
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
A lot of inspiration can be found in seemingly bizarre experiments.
For instance, with the properly constructed experiment, we could finally figure out "How many marketing people does it take to change a lightbulb?"
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What about the brain activity when your ex burns your arm?
I don't know why parent is being modded up and the AC down. It's not like the researchers are saying to one another, "seeing as being dumped feels exactly like spilling hot coffee one the hand, we should check if this is backed by brain scans". You say that you know that the difference is, in fact, detectable between the two by adequate brain scanning equipment. You back this up by saying that the experiences feel different. That is as ridiculous as saying that you've rubbed charcoal and diamonds on paper, and you know they're different elements.
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That may simply be due to a difference in intensity and duration. That says nothing about which part of the brain is going to handle each stimulus.
The idea that emotional pain can manifest itself physically is hardly new, and this experiment reinforces that idea.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
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?
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
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
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.
"Your honor, it was only in self-defense that I tracked my runaway bride to Michigan and murdered her there."
Yes, you can claim that.
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.
That is as ridiculous as saying that you've rubbed charcoal and diamonds on paper, and you know they're different elements.
No this is a case of a very vague study with low precision. I'm not saying that the same regions of the brain don't light up... I'm saying even though they light up it doesn't mean the experiences are terribly similar.
This study was the first to show that rejection can elicit a response in two brain areas associated with physical pain: the secondary somatosensory cortex and the dorsal posterior insula.
With insufficient precision you can say "Both pain and rejection cause neural activity!" But that doesn't tell you much.
A more apt analogy to this study would be the researchers taking glass and diamond and concluding they are carbon since they're both hard.
I could tell you that both anger and arousal elicit an adreneline rush. That doesn't mean they are the same.
For the sake of researching long term pain studies then yes I imagine the fact that both use inter-related circuitry is insightful and useful. But statements like "To the brain, heartbreak and emotional torment are no different from having hot coffee spilled on your hand" are terribly misleading.
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.
This is not really news; there was a different set of researchers last year who found that people taking painkillers like ibuprofin had less emotional hurt when a girlfriend dumped them.... So if you are expecting a messy breakup, take a bunch of ibuprofin as if you had a migrane.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
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!"
"Of course, after this experiment is finished. I have another experiment for you. In my pants."
Ha. I've had nightmares like what you described, but they weren't quite that bad.
This study also makes me curious what effect emotional and neurological disorders might have on the results. Being bipolar, I've experienced quite lot of emotional turmoil in my life (some of it my own fault, admittedly), and what you describe is sometimes how my life feels. Later on, I can see my perceptions and reactions were irrational, but it always feels normal, at the time. I can be philosophical and resilient about an emotionally traumatic event, yet fall to pieces because a friend didn't call me back at the set time. It's weird.
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)
In my opinion, any ethically run study on the mechanisms of pain and how they might be linked or related to the mechanisms of depression are a Good Thing
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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.
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.
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make install -not war