How come, when I get hit in the balls, the pain feels like it’s in the intestine or stomach? The sensation resembles having a stomachache or something like that. I’m guessing it has to do with the neurons in the lower abdominal area and/or where they map to in the brain.
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The brain is not good at localizing internal pain. A similar effect to the testicular-pain-in-abdomen effect is that when people have heart attacks they often feel pain in their arm or jaw. This effect is called *referred pain*. Internal pain at a specific location usually cannot be distinguished from other internal pain carried on the same nerve path.
Early in fetal development, we’re essentially all female – the reproductive organs are internal. It’s only later on in development that the male organs descend. But the nerve “wiring” stays the same.
Most internal organs and the testicles are all connected via the same nerve:the vagus nerve and the body can’t really tell from where exactly the hurt signal came from.
In a particularly odd bit of human development, the testes originally develop in the abdomen and descend slowly, getting wrapped in layers of abdominal wall as they go. They share a nerve supply, which like most internal pain is dull and vague rather than sharp and localized. As a result, the brain only knows that internal testicular pain is coming from somewhere in the abdomen/related area. It’s an example of referred pain, where the pain doesn’t line up with the actual location.
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