Saturday, January 14, 2017

Neurocogntive Psychology 101

There are several different types of nerve cells in your body. Some cells are exclusively suited for communication, like telephone wires of olden days. Some specialize in sensation of specific things like reacting to light or sound, and within those specialties there is even more distinction, like retinal nerves that only activate with red light or taste buds that only activate with salty things.

The majority, of course, are actually in your brain and--truth be told--whenever you think you are sensing something like cold or bright or loud, those sensations are almost meaningless out of the context that your brain places them. As is typical in science, the greatest leaps in understanding occur when something goes wrong. The notion of contextual sensation is poignantly obvious with what we call "phantom limb syndrome." Even with an amputated limb, individuals report "feeling" things (often pain) in a limb that is no longer connected to the body. This is particularly difficult to treat since most often, it is the removal of the painful stimulus that results in the greatest relief.

So goes the saying that "it's all in your head." While that is certainly an oversimplification, it is true that the nerve cells in the brain are ultimately slightly more important than the nerves out "in the field" of the body's periphery. If you touch a hot stove, while it is the finger that gets damaged, another nerve delivers that carry that signal to the spinal cord and it's not until the signal reaches the brain that an impulse is generated that goes back to that hand to pull it back from the stove. Of course, all that happens in an instant, but you get the point. So all nerve impulse go through a sensation-perception-reaction process series. Depending on the individual and intensity of the stimulus, voluntary control can be seized before a reaction occurs, like a person who can hold their hand over a flame for a longer-than-normal interval of time.

So how do you help a person in pain, particularly when the source of the painful sensation is idiopathic and/or no longer physically present? The two conditions most baffling to pain management specialists are allodynia and hyperalgesia. The first is a malfunction "somewhere" in the sensation-perception process that causes a non-painful stimulus to be interpreted as pain. The second is a malfunction where a "mild" sensation of pain is perceived as "severe" to "excruciating" pain. Many individuals who need medical treatment for pain have one or both of these conditions.

Next Blog: How to Relieve Pain (to be posted on or about January 29, 2017)

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