How does it work when you mentally block out pain? What happens in the brain?
In: Biology
Say you prick your finger with a needle. Damaged cells in that area release chemicals that cause tiny nerves in the area to fire. These signals make their way from your finger to your spinal cord, where they then travel up the spinal cord and into your brain, which creates the sensation of pain.
But–it’s not a one-way signal!. There’s a second pathway, called the descending inhibitory pathway, that gets input from a bunch of different parts of your brain and actually sends signals through a second set of nerves all the way back down the spinal cord and out to the fingertip. That second signal does a few things–first, it actually can block the first pain signal at the spinal cord level. It also can act at the nerve endings that first felt the pain, making them less sensitive.
That descending pathway communicates using endorphins, which are very chemically similar to opioids like morphine, heroin, codeine, etc. That’s why these drugs are such effective painkillers!
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