Was just talking to my mom and told her that the brain itself cannot feel pain and she hit me with “What is a headache caused by then” question.
In: Biology
OP we **do not know** the answer to this and I regret to inform you some will speak as if they do. There are *many* causes of headache, some more obvious than the other.
For instance, some have told you already how it has something to do with the nerves. You do not have sensation in your brain. Local anesthetic is not needed for brain surgeries (ie lobotomies).
You can sense pressure inside the head (which is actually distinct from pain), but that is the extent of what we know. Sometimes there are fragments of the skull in serious emergency that break off & cause pain locally, other times there’s well established types of cancers that cause headaches in certain regions, or splitting headaches.
For a headache originating from, say, the common cold, we don’t know where they come from or how. There are some theories, but they’re VERY unscientific and some are unfalsifiable (ie making correlation observations) and could be interpreted many ways.
TL;DR: We don’t know.
Latest Answers