The neuroscience of pain. | Marwa Azab | TEDxMississauga

donated of Commons really burn the broken hearts really feel broken when actions hurt our feelings do they actually cause physical pain or is it just an analogy is it a linguistic coincidence that when our psyches hurts we describe it by using physical terms really is a language all that uncreated these questions are no longer just for poets and philosophers to entertain scientists have a lot to say about these questions as well thanks to technology we know that rejection and isolation are very painful to our social brains so when it comes to physical pain we know that it has two components the first is what scientists like to call the sensory component so for example I have sharp pain in my lower right leg that lasted a few moments it includes the location the intensity the duration of that pain the second component the affective or the emotional component and probably critical to our conversation today is one where the brain coordinates an emotional storm when we're in pain to match that first component we don't feel good when we're in pain we typically feel fear anger sadness so it's not surprising that people who suffer from chronic pain they also developed secondary conditions like depression and/or an anxiety in fact depression on its own Alucard can cause its own physical symptoms such as headaches general body pains so when it comes to defining physical pain it's kind of easy we have terms for it we have folk AB we can describe its duration its intensity its location it's a little bit more troublesome and vague when we say emotional social psychological pain what exactly does that mean to me it's pearls of emotions forming a necklace that may choke the heart it's the force that dilates time but constricts space pain is watching a soul mate in pain and not being able to do anything about it pain is irreversibly losing a loved one but also pain is not losing a loved one who continues to hurt you pain is when you finally heal but you live in the rest for the rest of your life worried in fear that the pain would come back pain is that unwelcomed intrusive memory that haunts your present moment and steals from it it's a word that's actually aimed at the most tender part of your heart pain is when the heart is finally done emotional pain hurts and as it turns out physical emotional pain have a lot in common and one way to demonstrate this is to show that their shared activation in the brain for both types of pain so that if somebody's experiencing physical pain like the one I explained earlier in the right leg that certain areas in the brain are gonna light up and also that these same areas or at least part of that network would also light up when the person is experiencing rejection for example and that is precisely what eisenbergers lab demonstrated in a series of eloquent studies we know that when people are experiencing physical pain burning sensation down chronic that certain areas in the brain light up notably the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and the anterior insula and don't worry I won't mention these names again I see the faces I will just refer to them as pain related areas so how about when we expose people to emotional pain to the same areas light up absolutely the same exact areas that light up when we're experiencing physical pain particularly for the second component also lights up when we feel rejected you might be wondering how on earth does the researcher make somebody who's sitting who has to sit still in a scanner feel rejected or isolated or is suffering in psychological suffering here's how it goes they get the participant they put them in the scanner and they tell them you're gonna play a virtual cyber ball game and the participant is like to think that they're playing this ball they're tossing it back and forth with two other players of course these two other players don't exist and it just really under the control of the experimenter and it's computerized so in some of the trials eventually the two other players don't toss the ball to the person in the scanner and during these trials even though this is just an experiment for a short while and the participant knows it's an experiment that during these trials the same pain related areas light up it activated how do you know that that was actually distressing for the participant in the scanner well you asked them so and when they asked them how did it feel in these trials they subject to say things like I felt like I was meaningless in fact the more activations in these pain related areas during these rejection trials the more they reported being emotionally hurt so there's a positive correlation between the two that brings us to we have different thresholds different tolerances right after a surgery someone might need you know I don't know six pills of right again and someone else might need just tylenol people have different thresholds when women give birth some are in the bathtub singing songs and some are requiring multiple epidurals and the detachment of a body part preferably of the person who caused this pain I won't necessarily share right now publicly which camp I belong to but the point is is that we have different thresholds is it the same for psychological pain do we have different tolerance there's certainly different factors that can increase or decrease our psychological suffering social support is one that dulls that decreases our psychological distress as you might have guessed and how this is done it's done because of chemicals like oxytocin one that coordinates maternal behavior and is important for social bonds so you know that time when you go for coffee with a friend you're enjoying the conversation you feel so understood you don't feel judged you really like that experience that encounter is sponsored by your oxy talk who cares about the friend just get the antitoxin right you don't have to pay for two but that's beside the point so we know that oxytocin actually reduces activity comes down the the pain related areas in the brain the other thing is we have different personalities there's hundreds of different personalities in the room today and certain personalities do have a hyperactive pain areas in the brain these are people that tend to be people pleasers they want to please everybody around them they're very much affected by negative feedback or even neutral ones and when you look inside their brain sure enough these areas in the brain that have to do with pain I Harper hyperactive also there are genetic predispositions people have different genes one particular polymorphism for an opioid receptor gene lowers our tolerance for pain quite a bit okay so what on earth does that mean what that means is is that a particular gene that's very important for how we process pain and how we respond for painkillers like particularly opiates comes in different letters in the population in different variation one particular variation happens to lower our threshold for pain quite a bit so these people who carry that genetic background they end up taking a lot more medication after surgery you might have guessed it what if we take these people with that genetic background and predisposition for a low tolerance for pain put them in the scanner and have them play that cyber ball game and be ignored they've done that and what they saw was is that in these people with this genetic background that have a low tolerance for physical pain it turns out that they also have a low tolerance for psychological pain so there's no difference between the two my bet is if your tolerance for physical pain is low so will your acceptance of negative feedback so what are we your reaction to suffering it'll also be affected as well both are correlated both types of pain and that's why when people are in distress sometimes they will suffer medicate with alcohol with food with drugs illicit or prescription so we know that that people can do this to medicate to self-medicate but why do people do that why would they self-medicate because we know that there is a correlation between the two and this shared relationship between psychological and physical pain is not inconsequential so it's important in the workplace for parenting for education we know that for example if kids are being really not a part of the playground and they're being bullied that's gonna hurt and who can learn when they're in pain the co-worker that gets excluded from the lunch invitation from the conversation next to the coffee machine in the kitchen that hurts and who can perform efficiently when they're in pain there's consequences for this the criticism at home from a parent from or at work from a boss that's not inconsequential we know for example also that when they've done this interesting study where they gave participants tylenol for three weeks and when they look at their diaries with you know reporting back and analyzing it they see that the people who took tylenol that reduced the threshold for four hurts so they would report less hurt than the group who took a placebo you take these people put them in the scanner have them play that rejection game again where they're being ignored the ball is not being tossed to them give them tylenol and what do you see you see a calming effect in the pain related areas it all fits so take a Tylenol the point is minorities that are alienated from mainstream society that hurts and it shows in the surveys we know that the prevalence of depression and anxiety is much higher in minorities that are not accepted so what should we do should we be on the look out for something to get rid of emotional pain to get rid of rejection like a rejection killer pill here's the thing though is that pain has a purpose and if we ignore pain messages we end up damaging our tissues we end up damaging our souls for example if you put your hand on a hot stove and not move it I don't know why you would do that don't try that at home but whatever you put your hand on the stove for long enough you're gonna damage your hand and when a body part is in pain the body recruits an army of inflammatory soldier soldiers to make that area more sensitive more visible and that inflammatory pain is there so the body can pay extra attention to that part while it heals it doesn't matter whether the pain is emotional psychological social or physical the goal is one and that is to protect the most tender part of you some people are born with the inability to feel pain they don't live very much and they don't live very long the reason is is they can't make use of a very important signal to move away from dangerous stuff psychological suffering is it important for us to connect as human beings it is the most elementary part of the most important ingredients in long-term relationships that we desperately need sympathy empathy compassion understanding we can't live very long without these types of relationships even if the price is to endure some pain there's some pain that you can't wait to get rid of and there's some pain that you can't wait for its arrival when life darts arrows penetrating at your heart you can't wait for the healer to remove these arrows even though you know very well that it's gonna be a very painful process two words four-letter each begin with the same sound seem like opposites but couldn't be more synonymous hurt and healed you can't heal from great pain without experiencing great pain the law of conservation of energy states that the total amount of energy must stay constant if we manipulate this all a little bit to serve our conversation here today you can say that the amount of energy that goes into making pain shall match the amount of energy that goes into healing that pain some of the worst pain that anybody can experience are traumas trauma is when somebody experiences some sort of experience that violates the basic assumptions of humanity if you've experienced the trauma pain it lives within you forever and when we reject that trauma that pain will reject parts of ourselves we suppress critical parts of who we are we should make peace with them because there isn't it time to become whole again you know in some cultures when things break they put the pieces back together and they fill in the gaps with things like gold powder platinum silver when trauma breaks us into pieces it's a second chance for us to rebuild to redesign ourselves so the question becomes how will you redesign your new self and what will you use to fill in the gaps thank you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 44,103

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Science (hard), Brain, Happiness, Mental health, Pain, Psychology

Id: qmvbvpbG7jQ

Length: 17min 52sec (1072 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 09 2019