ELI5- How does your body determine different pain, types? Burning, stinging, aching, stabbing, etc..

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I just put hand sanitizer on an open cut and it stung a lot. It made me wonder why didn’t it have a burning feeling? Why didn’t it have an achy feeling?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Basically your body has several different types of receptors that “feel” the pain as well as different types of nerves they use to convey that information to the brain and they also reach the brain at different speeds.

Depending on which kind of receptor sends the info through which kind of nerve, the brain interprets that as different kinds of pain. Being able to differentiate between different kinds of pain is very useful to us.

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