snowleopard-star blog

Your Brain Invents Pain. Here’s Why.

• Suicide headaches are interesting!
• Red heads have a higher tolerance?? And need more anesthesia
• Thermal Grill Illusion
  • Hot hot dog and 5 degree (kinda cold) one, placed interchangeably 
  • Put your hand on top, this is incredibly painful. Why?
  • Really intense cold registers as burning! Extreme hot and extreme cold set off this burning sensation receptor to your brain (we have 2, that and one that says “this is just cool”). (hot and cold do not go off together ever, unless TERRIBLE pain).
  • The warm hot dogs say “this is not cool”, if u held just the cold one it wouldn’t trigger anything. But because the hot ones are there it blocks that chill receptor because it’s not cool, so only the burning sensation appears in your brain. 
  • Because both go off, you think this is terrible pain.
• Okay so this is interesting because you AREN’T in pain, so pain is not a faithful telling of your environment! It’s just a construct your brain is doing and it is sometimes wrong!
• Some people have really serious chronic pain without there being any tissue pain or underlying cause
• Noseseption is the perception of pain. Detecting and encoding pain stimuli
  • Raw signal that travels up the nerves
  • PAIN is what your brain does with that signal
  • You can have signals with no pain, under anesthesia and being cut wide open your nerves are definitely sending signals to your brain, but you aren’t registering it.
  • And pain with no signal (Phantom pain with no limbs)
• 2 pain signals: (hit your thumb with a hammer, or touch a hot stove) precise OUCH and quick (faster than 1 m/s i forgot lol), and (pulling your hand away from that hammer, stub your toe) DULL numbing pain (1 m/s).
• Both have their own purpose:
  • MOVE
  • And then another one is a reminder to tenderly treat that part of your body
• These receptors aren’t in your brain at all! It is in the surrounding area. That’s why brain surgery needs no anesthesia.
• So what is the feeling of mental exhaustion? Long focus or thinking a lot, you feel like you’ve been using your head. So what is that? Our brains don’t have nerves.
  • Theory is exhaustion or depression is that there are not enough charged particles in the right place. 
  • Headset that applies electrical current to your head and rids of brain fog. Really gentle low electrical current, anode and cathode. Essentially, all your neurons are charged particles moving from one place to another, so this changes the resting membrane potential of neurons. Transcranial direct current stimulation
• The way we feel pain: tip of every pain nerve (NAV 1.7) there is a gate. If the gate is open, you feel pain. If blocked and modified, you would feel no pain. STILL have sensation but 0 pain.
• How you are feeling emotionally is a key part of pain, almost all of the story actually. Descending control system, gateway through spinal cord, close the gates before you feel anything. Or confuse the signal (rubbing knee when little kids hurts).
  • More stressed = worse, relaxed is easier
  • More you think danger is here = worse and more intense