![]() In this way, pain is an inherently alarming sensation. No other sensation, such as tickles or itches or numbness, typically puts us into a state of alarm. It alerts us and we reflexively guard, protect, pull away and seek help. Pain is the only sensation that puts us on notice in this way. Something is going wrong and as a result we experience pain. We accidentally touch flame with our hand or we break our ankle or step on a nail. It is signaling danger in the sense of harm. It makes sense that we’d be built this way - that our danger response would go off when having a certain sensation that we call pain. These areas are responsible for a great many things, but one of which is our danger response, commonly known as “fight-or-flight” or “fight, flight, or freeze.” It is our innate alarm system - something that gets activated in response to threat. Second, in addition to the somatosensory cortex, the scan would reveal activity in the limbic system and prefrontal cortex. ![]() It is largely responsible for the type of sensation (whether it would be a dull ache, a sharp piercing sensation, an electrical sensation, or what have you) and where in the body it will be felt (the left ankle that has the fracture or the right foot with the nail sticking in it). This area of the brain corresponds to the sensation that would be felt. ![]() Different parts of the brain that roughly correspond to both the felt sensation and alarm would light up in the scan (Da Silva & Seminowicz, 2019 Sperry et al., 2017).įirst, the somatosensory cortex of the brain would show up as active. Suppose you broke your ankle, or stepped on a nail, or some other typically painful injury, and further suppose you were put into an MRI for a brain scan. Pain as a sensory and emotional experience maps onto the brain. We thus might capture the definition of pain as “a sensory and emotional experience” with a quasi-equation: pain = sensation + alarm. We perceive it through our tactile sense, but it involves a similarly alerting and cautionary experience to which we reflexively react with avoidant behaviors (e.g., reflexively pulling away our hand from flame). Of course, we do not hear pain, but feel it. They are an auditory perception that is inherently alarming. Fire alarms alert us to something that is going wrong in the building and we reflexively react with avoidance behaviors - we get out of the building. In this way, pain is like a fire alarm in a building. Pain is a sensation that alerts us to something that is going wrong. ![]() We look to others for help, and others react accordingly. Tickles make us giggle, and we squirm in their playfulness. Itches are aggravating, especially when they don’t easily go away, and scratching them is relieving. Less readily acknowledged is that sensations also have emotional aspects to them. Grade school children have tummy aches the night before the first day of school. We can sometimes almost burst with tingling energy when excited. Excitement and fear, for instance, are palpable. It is readily apparent with emotions, which commonly involves also having sensations. There is, however, cross over between the experiences of sensations and emotions. These experiences are rightly not considered sensations. Emotions are experiences such as being happy or mad or sad or joyful. We do not see, hear or taste pain and itches and the like, but rather we tactilely feel them. They are associated with our tactile sense of perception. Pain is like itches, tickles, numbness and tingling. For who thinks of pain as even in part emotional?Īfter all, pain is a sensation, not an emotion. It is also commonly surprising to patients. This definition of pain is arguably accepted worldwide by clinicians, researchers, and policy-makers. It reads: “Pain is a sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.” It was a revision of their earlier version from 1979, which also contained the phrase defining pain as a “sensory and emotional experience.” The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), which is the world’s largest pain-related professional organization, revised their official definition of pain last year.
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