When You Hurt, My Brain Says I Hurt, Too: Study

[Crimson and Clover]

i thought this was kinda neat and weird

Tue March 25, 2003 12:26 PM ET
By Alison McCook

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - New research suggests that people don't just
feel bad for you when you stub your toe--their brains actually react a bit
as if they were hurt themselves.
Researchers at Stanford University in California obtained their findings
from studying people's brain activity while they watched videos of other
people being hurt, such as clips of sporting injuries or car crashes.
The authors found that similar areas of the brain were activated both when
people watched another person getting hurt and when they, themselves,
experienced modest pain during a subsequent experiment.
"What we found in this study is that there is a common overlap in the way
that we, as humans, perceive pain, as well as how we perceive pain in otherpeople when they are hurt," study author Dr. Sean Mackey told Reuters
Health.
These neurological expressions of empathy, or the ability to identify with
others' feelings, may serve an important purpose in society, Mackey added.
"It is this empathy that binds all of us together in society and allows us
to feel how other people are feeling so that we can better understand their
intentions and actions," Mackey said.
"It allows us to respond to other people's distress and take action to
remove them from the threat," he noted.
Mackey added that the brain may have a limited number of structures with
which to perform certain functions. In the case of pain perception, these
structures may "overlap" when people feel pain and witness it in others, he
noted.
His team reported the findings last week in Chicago at the annual meeting of
the American Pain Society.
During the experiment, Mackey and his colleagues asked 14 people to watch a
series of videos of others being injured, while the investigators performed
imaging scans of their brains.
When participants were not watching the videos, the researchers applied
heated blocks onto their forearms and recorded how their brains responded to
their own experience of pain.
Mackey and his colleagues discovered overlaps--though not exact
matches--between how participants' brains responded to pain and to seeing
pain in others.
Mackey explained that there are two components to how the brain responds to
an unpleasant sensation, which it later perceives as pain: a sensory
component, which reflects the location and type of the sensation; and an
emotional component, which tells us how badly the sensation feels.
"We found overlap in the areas of the brain that process the emotional
components of pain, as well as the sensory components of pain," Mackey
explained.
These findings support the idea that the experience of pain is very complex
and is influenced by both sensation and emotion, the researcher added.
"When a patient is experiencing pain or when someone is seeing someone else
experience pain, the emotions and feelings are part of that experience," he
said.
"Traditionally, we have viewed pain as being more of simple sensory event
that causes an emotional response," Mackey added. "We are learning that this
view was too simplistic."

[Hershey]

That interesting-its cool in a way.

[laceyinthesky]

Yeah, it is interesting. It's nice to know that when you're hurt other people sunconsciously know how you are feeling.

[-*Leah*-]

Originally posted by laceyinthesky
Yeah, it is interesting. It's nice to know that when you're hurt other people sunconsciously know how you are feeling.

yeah lol !