People who say "I feel your pain" really do
source: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BL0H920091222
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- DeliaTheArtist
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British researchers used brain-imaging technology to show that people who say they feel the pain of others have heightened activity in pain-sensing brain regions when they see someone else being hurt.
For the study, the researchers exposed 108 college students to images of painful situations, ranging from athletes suffering sports injuries and patients receiving an injection.
Nearly a third said that, for at least one image, they not only had an emotional reaction, but also fleetingly felt pain in the same site as the injury in the image.
The researchers found that while viewing the painful images, both people who said they felt pain and those who did not showed activity in the emotional centers of the brain.
But those who said they felt pain showed greater activity in pain-related brain regions compared with the others, and as compared with their own brain responses to the emotional images.
"Patients with functional pain experience pain in the absence of an obvious disease or injury to explain their pain," Dr. Stuart Derbyshire of the University of Birmingham, one of the researchers, told Reuters Health.
"We think this confirms that at least some people have an actual physical reaction when observing others being injured or expressing pain," Derbyshire said.
He noted that the people who reported feeling pain also tended to say that they avoided horror movies and disturbing images on the news "so as to avoid being in pain".
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5BL0H920091222
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UndoInfluence
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This is a form of synesthesia called mirror-touch synesthesia. Motherfortruth is slightly off in her assumptions of what causes this, it is simply a slightly different way of the brain wiring itself compared to the "norm". In actuality though all of us know at least one person who has a form of synesthesia (or even multiple forms as it often occurs in more than one pathway). This is one of my forms and it definitely leads to some vicarious moments in life, even leading to me blacking out in many occasions from some pretty severe mirror-pain when I was young.
And no, it isn't a prerequisite that I have experienced that type of pain before in order to experience it, the brain simply infers what the pain actually feels like and while not 100% accurate does get pretty darn close most of the time. It is the same with my mirror-taste synesthesia, while looking I can experience the flavors of things I have never eaten before resulting in new sensations that aren't always right.
- 2 years ago
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UndoInfluence
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endovenoso
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from personal experience, you can desensitize yourself to feeling this kind of pain. I used to feel every needle prick when I saw one on tv or in a movie, but after being in the hospital I could probably draw my own blood without pain
- 2 years ago
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endovenoso
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MotherForTruth
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Interesting subject DeliaTheArtist. Thank you for this post.
IMO People who can actually feel someone's pain have past experience of painful situations both emotional pain and physical pain. As a result they can relate to someone's painful experience. A person who never was hungry could not ever relate how starving person feels. - 2 years ago
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MotherForTruth
