BRAIN TALK:  THE LINK BETWEEN PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HURT
A very interesting piece today on cnn.com from Dr. Charles Raison.  It all makes sense to me--see if it makes sense to you:

"...let's start with this example. Have you ever noticed that when you are in physical pain you are more likely to be down and irritable than at other times? Ever noticed that when you are stressed, down or anxious you are more likely to feel pains in your body than at other times?  If not, count yourself either young, lucky or both. For the rest of us, our experiences go along with lots of data showing that physical pain increases the chances of feeling emotional pain, and vice versa. Said more formally, depression is a risk factor for aches and pains in the body, and aches and pains in the body are a risk factor for depression.  Why should this be? Most of us think of the body and brain as very mysterious and complicated, which they are. But in other ways they do things in a very literal and clunky fashion, and the connection between physical and emotional pain is a great example of this. These seemingly very different types of pain overlap because they share the same brain areas. Studies show that exactly the same brain areas light up in the scanner when people are exposed to emotional pain as when they are exposed to physical pain.  In particular there is a brain region called the anterior cingulated cortex, or ACC for short, which fires up whether you are snubbed by by other people or subjected to a physical pain....


So all this suggested a very ingenious experiment to researchers at UCLA. If physical pain and emotional pain share the same brain areas, maybe giving a painkiller would make people less sensitive to being rejected by other people. So the researchers randomized a group of people to receive either acetaminophen (brand name Tylenol) or a placebo pill. Neither the researchers nor the subjects knew who got what, but the people who got Tylenol began to report that they were less hurt by the way people treated them in their daily lives.  And after 3 weeks of either Tylenol or placebo all the subjects played the “cyberball” game in the brain scanner, and lo and behold the people who had received Tylenol showed much less activation of the ACC in their brains.  I’m not sure that the take-home message from all this is that we should be taking Tylenol to keep from getting our feelings hurt,  but rather that science is beginning to show logical explanations for many features of our lives that have been previously mysterious, such as why my stomach hurts when I get  stressed out."

Fascinating stuff.  Read the whole thing...


"When every physical and mental resources is focused, one's power to
solve a problem multiplies tremendously." -Norman Vincent Peale