This happens a lot when getting tattooed. Sometimes it feels like the pain from one spot travels somewhere else. I’ve heard people say they feel a spot on their arm in their hip, or a spot on their leg in their shoulder.
Today I was getting the side of my calf tattooed, near the back of the knee, and I actually felt the pain mirrored on the other side of that same leg, almost as if it was going right through. It was such a strange feeling that it made me laugh in pain. Like wtf brain?!
What causes the brain to mix up nervous system signals like this?
In: Biology
So I don’t know for sure why they get mixed up but in your skin you have somatosensory cells which are responsible for “feeling “. The channel of the nervous system (I.e. your spinal cord) in which the signal of pain gets sent to the brain are lateralized , meaning the left side of the body has a path and the right side has a path. They cross over each other a couple of times and both go through similar brain regions. I assume that during a crossover or while the signal is being processed in a brain region the signal gets sent down the opposite channel. Again, I’m not sure but that is my best guess based on my knowledge and I am a PhD student in cognitive psychology.
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