You feel me?

[novapsyche]

When You Hurt, My Brain Says I Hurt, Too: Study

New research suggests that people don't just feel bad for you when you stub your toe--their brains actually react a bit as if they were hurt themselves.

Researchers at Stanford University in California obtained their findings from studying people's brain activity while they watched videos of other people being hurt, such as clips of sporting injuries or car crashes.

The authors found that similar areas of the brain were activated both when people watched another person getting hurt and when they, themselves, experienced modest pain during a subsequent experiment.

"What we found in this study is that there is a common overlap in the way that we, as humans, perceive pain, as well as how we perceive pain in other people when they are hurt," study author Dr. Sean Mackey told Reuters Health.

These neurological expressions of empathy, or the ability to identify with others' feelings, may serve an important purpose in society, Mackey added.

"It is this empathy that binds all of us together in society and allows us to feel how other people are feeling so that we can better understand their intentions and actions," Mackey said.

"It allows us to respond to other people's distress and take action to remove them from the threat," he noted.

Mackey added that the brain may have a limited number of structures with which to perform certain functions. In the case of pain perception, these structures may "overlap" when people feel pain and witness it in others, he noted.

[...] During the experiment, Mackey and his colleagues asked 14 people to watch a series of videos of others being injured, while the investigators performed imaging scans of their brains.

When participants were not watching the videos, the researchers applied heated blocks onto their forearms and recorded how their brains responded to their own experience of pain.

Mackey and his colleagues discovered overlaps--though not exact matches--between how participants' brains responded to pain and to seeing pain in others.

Mackey explained that there are two components to how the brain responds to an unpleasant sensation, which it later perceives as pain: a sensory component, which reflects the location and type of the sensation; and an emotional component, which tells us how badly the sensation feels.

"We found overlap in the areas of the brain that process the emotional components of pain, as well as the sensory components of pain," Mackey explained.

These findings support the idea that the experience of pain is very complex and is influenced by both sensation and emotion, the researcher added.

"When a patient is experiencing pain or when someone is seeing someone else experience pain, the emotions and feelings are part of that experience," he said.

"Traditionally, we have viewed pain as being more of simple sensory event that causes an emotional response," Mackey added. "We are learning that this view was too simplistic."

Comments

Take that Wittgenstein!

[arjuna.livejournal.com]

I can't find, or am too lazy to find, a concise an understandable summary of philosophy Ludwig Wittgenstein's groundbreaking theory on the infamous "Private Language Argument" but if you come across it on your own I'd be amazed to consider if this article refutes it in anyway.

Re: Take that Wittgenstein!

[neuromancer2050.livejournal.com]

How would this article refute the "Private Language Argument?" Seems like it would only serve to substantiate it.

Re: Take that Wittgenstein!

[arjuna.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit rusty and perhaps you're right but what alerted me to a possible argument against the PLA is "The authors found that similar areas of the brain were activated both when people watched another person getting hurt and when they, themselves, experienced modest pain during a subsequent experiment." If this is the case then what LW is saying essentially about how we can never really understand another person's inner experience could be refuted if you say but the same areas of the brain are activated in the person who says "ouch" and the person who observes and expressess understanding. In this case we see the same physical experience being monitored. Perhaps the difficulty lies in whether or not the physical brain activity is matched between the person saying ouch and the observer and not so much the oberver when he sees the person saying ouch and later when it comes time for the observer to say ouch. The term ouch expressing an experience of pain being the indetermined experience. We'd have to assess whether or not the same areas of the brain are stimulated in all three (or five) instances, when ouch person says ouch and when he experiences ouch, when ouch person experiences watching observer seeing him say ouch, when observer sees person say ouch, when he experiences ouch and when he says ouch. I think that gets all the bases covered. Basically my understanding is that no matter how much we may argue about whether or not we can "truly" understand the experience of another person that specific aspect of the PLA has to be questioned under such evidence because we know for a fact that when we hit certain nerves in the human body they will always respond in every individual in the same way because our body is wired in that way otherwise the whole of medicine as a field would fall flat on its face.

But if I'm missing something or misunderstanding the PLA or the article please feel free to point that out. I don't see how it can substantiate the PLA argument. Perhaps I'm missing something here.

Re: Take that Wittgenstein!

[neuromancer2050.livejournal.com]

Actually, my mistake, I apologize. Wittgenstein did't support PLA, but argued against it.

"That a language is in principle unintelligible to anyone but its originating user is impossible. The reason for this is that such a so-called language would, necessarily, be unintelligible to its supposed originator too, for he would be unable to establish meanings for its putative signs."

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/