How does crying work? I get that you cry when you reach a certain point of emotion/pain, but how does your brain know it’s enough to cry?

Question

Does it depend on a certain threshold of concentration of chemicals? How does your brain determine that threshold? And what about phisical pain, which is like a signal rather than a chemical?

In: 12

Answer 1

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Answer 2

i believe crying is more of an emotional response to a situation. i don’t think the brain gets involved. maybe i need an ELI4 on this, but

Answer 3

A crying response (shedding tears, feeling a lump in your throat…) is evoked by the brain when a part of the brain has a high level of activity, to put it simply. It still isn’t clear which specific part of the brain activates the crying response, although it could be many parts that are involved in this rather complicated response.

There are two types of signals for the nervous system (that includes your brain!), which are electrical signals and chemical signals. Neurons use both signals to “talk” to one another, so when the “talking” gets louder to a certain level, the neurons send signals to initiate the crying response in the whole body. So, instead of saying that it depends on the concentration of certain chemicals, it’s more accurate to say that it depends on how active our brain is, or to continue our analogy, how “loud” our neurons are talking to one another.

You can say that there is somewhat a “threshold”, or a level of activity that has to be reached to initiate crying, but it’s incredibly hard to quantify that certain “threshold” – not to mention that the “threshold” will indeed differ across individuals, and even depend on the situation itself (are you under stress? are you in a comfortable situation? etc.)

As to physical pain, well, pain and emotion are what you feel, or rather, what is formed in your consciousness instead of what is happening in your body. We don’t know much about how consciousness forms, except that it is formed in your brain through complicated mechanisms when certain parts of neurons are “talking”. The same part of brain activity that “talks” when you are in pain/sad may also be that same part that initiates the crying response, or is able to activate parts of the brain that initiates the crying response, which explains the interrelatedness.