We all feel pain, we talk about pain, we complain about it and treat it, but what is it?
Pain isn’t completely understood yet, but researchers do know more about it now than they did in the past. Many questions remain though – such as why some people feel pain more than others, where does psychosomatic pain come in, and how come people who have limbs amputated can experience phantom pain – pain in the limb that is no longer there?
This is what the scientist do know:
There are three aspects to feeling pain, the peripheral nerves or the nerves that run along the body and sense the pain, cold, and heat; the spinal cord, that transmits these sensations of pain, cold, and heat; and the brain, or specifically the thalamus, that forwards the messages to three other parts of the brain. These are the somatosensory cortex, which causes you to feel the actual physical sensation, the limbic system, which is the emotional feeling region, and the frontal cortex, which is where the thinking is done.
Because there are three different systems involved in the transmission of pain, there are several ways that the pain can be distorted or changed as it is registered. For example, the emotional part of the brain can affect how you see the pain because of previous emotional experiences and the thinking part of the brain can affect the sensation by your expectations of whether it will hurt or not, memories of what has happened before, what you have seen and heard of others in similar situations, and so on.
So, although the pain is truly physical (a broken bone does hurt!), how that pain is interpreted can vary widely from person to person. Someone who is in great physical shape and has worked his or her way through pain before may not feel in as much pain as someone who has experienced a lot of pain in the past and feels very sensitive towards it. This, of course, is part of what makes treating pain so difficult.