When You Hurt, My Brain
Says I Hurt, Too: Study
Excerpt By Alison McCook, Reuters Health

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 stated.

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.

His team reported the findings last week in Chicago at the annual meeting of the American Pain Society.

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."

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