How can a tiny pimple can hurt a whole shoulder?
In: Biology
As good as the other answers about referred pain are, I don’t feel like they quite explain it like you’re 5.
Basically, you have a highway with 8 lanes there’s a Ferrari in lane 7 and a VW beetle in lane 8. Imagine the highway merges lane 1 with 2, 3 with 4 and so on. The highway now has 4 lanes. And this happens again, so the highway has 2 lanes. Now there’s a toll booth on each lane of the highway. Does the toll booth in lane 2 know whether the beetle and the Ferrari were in different lanes? As far as the toll booth is aware, they’ve always been in the same lane and there’s not much way to know where they came from.
The body’s nerves work similarly where the closer you get to the brain, the more the nerves merge together and pain from one spot can feel like it covers a larger area than it does, or even from a completely different spot.
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