What causes us to feel pain? And what causes the different types of pain we feel when we smash our finger with a hammer or get a paper cut? Scientists have now proposed a new theory that describes pain as a multi-layered gradual event.
If you accidentally bang your finger with a hammer, you feel injured finger tissue. You focus all your attention on your injured finger and make sure not to repeat the action. This is both the physical and psychological manifestations of pain, so-called nociceptive pain experienced by your body.
However, you experience a different type of pain when you see a friend injure themselves in the same way. In this case, you experience empathetic pain. And while you haven't sustained any injury, to some extent you experience the same symptoms.
Previous studies have shown that the same brain structures are activated, whether the pain is experienced personally or is empathetic. These particular parts of the brain are called the anterior insula and the cingulate cortex. However, the extent to which the two forms of pain really are similar remains controversial.
In order to examine this idea a bit more closely, the researchers in the latest study proposed a new theory when it comes to pain. Pain itself should be seen as a complex interaction of multiple elements, which then come together to form the complex experience that is called "pain."
The elements of pain include sensory processes. These determine where the pain stimulus was triggered. In addition, the researchers point out that pain also includes emotional processes, such as the negative feeling experienced during pain.
"The decisive point is that the individual processes can also play a role in other experiences, albeit in a different activation pattern," said Tania Singer, director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognition and Brain Sciences.
The general components of pain signal an experience that is not pleasant. This specific information then tells us that pain, is indeed, involved whether it's experienced by you or someone else.
"The fact that our brain processes pain and other unpleasant event simultaneous for the most part, no matter if they are experienced by us or someone else, is very important for social interactions, because it helps us to understand what others are experiencing," said Anita Tusche, one of the authors of the new study.
The findings reveal a bit more about what is involved in processing pain. More specifically, they show how both empathetic and personal pain can have similar processes.
The findings are published in the March 2016 journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
