A Painful Anecdote

[Hyperlite]

I was thinking the other day about an instance which occured when I was in grade school. Our third grade class had a sewing project for which the entire class was expected to participate in. My sewing partner knelt down upon a needle which was sticking up out of the carpet. I watched as the needle penetrated into the girls kneecap. However, the girl remained oblivious to the presence of the needle and continued with her work. Nevertheless, I felt the need to notify her of the impaled object and as soon as she noticed it, she began to scream hyterically from the pain. Clearly from my understanding of the central nervous system, there would be nerves located within the vicinity of one's kneecap and therefore when injured this area would elicit alarms of pain in the brain. I am wondering if there is a scientific explaination to why she would not have felt the pain until she saw the needle in her knee? I guess as the saying goes, you should see it to believe it...

[Callipygous]

she may not have felt any pain. nerves come to the surface like pores. put your fingertips on a table with your palm a couple inches off the surface. think along those lines, its possible to insert something small, like a needle, without hitting nerves (something i learned from my diabetic friend, sometimes she just doesnt feel her shots). it may be she was screaming out of panic (something i have witnessed on several occasions with children), or that when you alerted her to it she moved it while trying to look and hurt some nerves in the process.

[bloodhound]

it used to happen a lot with me.. when i was a kid in my country , i used to handle a lot of sharp knives and swords, and i usually cut my fingers, but it didnt start hurting until i notice its bleeding. dont know why it happens. maybe because you brain is preoccupied with something more important?

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

Like the cartoon characters who run off of a cliff and don't start falling until they look down?

 

It happens to me too. I suppose your brain dismisses it as "just another itch" or something like that and you don't notice it until your eyes tell you that, boy, that really ought to hurt.

[Callipygous]

it used to happen a lot with me.. when i was a kid in my country , i used to handle a lot of sharp knives and swords, and i usually cut my fingers, but it didnt start hurting until i notice its bleeding. dont know why it happens. maybe because you brain is preoccupied with something more important?

 

iv noticed that too... one time i was cutting some cheese and had the wrong side of the knife facing down (yeah yeah, i know... ) and all i noticed at first was that it wasnt cutting, then i looked at the finger i was pushing down with and it started hurting.

 

wierd.

[mossoi]

There is a small delay between receiving an injury and feeling it - a second or so, but this is not likely the reason for the above examples.

 

As others have said it's probably shock that caused her to scream because if you actually think about it a needle in your knee isn't really that painful, in fact most things aren't as painful as we tell ourselves they are. A pin prick does, more often than not, feel like an itch, it's only when we look and think "that's should hurt, it's needle in my knee" that the full pain response occurs.

[srh]

I?ve noticed this sort of behaviour particularly in children. When they fall off their bike, or fall over walking, running etc, besides recovering from the shock that the ground just jumped up and attacked them, they generally seem fairly calm. Most of the time they even stand back up, and it?s not until they notice the graze on their knee that they go off like a siren.

There would have to be studies or articles on this apparent link between visual stimulus and the communication of pain to the brain?

[The Nacho]

That happened once in 2nd or 1st grade: I got a bathroom stall door smashed on my thumb, and it didn't seem to hurt. Then, when I looked at my hand, there was a bunch of blood and stuff, and it suddenly started hurtin'. I almost cut my thumb off...

[Glider]

There is a dissociation between the stimulus and the experience of pain. Pain is a psychological state and a significant component of the experience is your emotional response to the stimulus. If, for some reason, you are not paying attention to, or are distracted from the stimulus, this component will be missing and the resulting experience won't be pain, merely an intense physical sensation.

[YT2095]

Glider:

 

do Endorphines play a role also?

supose I`m working (moving a ton of compost) manualy, sometimes I find that silly little pains (a mild toothache for example) can seem to go away, is that distraction or endorphines?

and if it`s endorphimes, how come they don`t stop a backache if you over work?

[Drug addict]

Pain is a very subjective experience and pain thresholds vary from person to person, and within an individual. I once broke one of my metacarpals in the first minute of a rugby match and still played the whole game. When I went to hospital in the evening the doctors were proding it around I there was a whole gaggle of students playing with it and they were amazed that I was sitting there and letting them do it.

 

YT: maybe endorphins are short acting and so would enable you to escape from danger even if you were injured.

[Glider]

Glider:

 

do Endorphines play a role also?

supose I`m working (moving a ton of compost) manualy' date=' sometimes I find that silly little pains (a mild toothache for example) can seem to go away, is that distraction or endorphines?

and if it`s endorphimes, how come they don`t stop a backache if you over work?[/quote']

It's probably a bit of both, but more likely distraction. Nagging little pains are bad because they grab your attention. If you can find a way of redirecting your attention (distraction), you won't notice the pain. This is of course dependent on the severity of the pain to begin with. However, if you're working really hard, you will cause endorphine release, which will help too.

 

Toothache, or any orofacial pain for that matter, is differrent from other pain. Most of our central pain control mechanisms occur at the spinal level, in the dorsal horn of the spinal cord. There are tracts decending from the periaqueductal grey area, through the Raphe nucleus and down the Raphe-spinal tract to the dorsal horn, where they synapse with incoming primary afferents in the laminae of the substanatia gelatinosa. These are associated with endogenous pain control. However, toothache and other oro-facial pain (myalgia etc.) involve cranial nerves. These do not enter the spinal cord at all, but pass directly to the brain, so they don't have the benefit of any spinal level 'damping'. This is why toothache (and the pain of dental surgery) is such a bastard pain. It is subject to the action of endorphines though, because their action occurs both at the spinal and cranial level.

 

However, endorphine release happens only under certain circumstances, e.g. high physical stress (around 75% VO2 Max and above) or high psychological stress. So, if you are exercising hard; running, digging or whatever, or under extreme psychological stress; e.g. in a crash, or in fear of your life for some reason, endorphines will block out the worst of the pain.

 

This is adaptive as extreme pain can render an individual incapable of acting, and endorphine release allows an individual to keep going (to get away from the source of the danger/damage) despite significant injury. However, after overworking, e.g. digging too hard, you will have strained the muscles in your back and it's the day after that you suffer. The day after the exercise, you won't be working hard, nor under significant psychological stress, so there will be little/no endorphine release to dampen the pain. This too is adaptive; the pain will act as a deterrent to significant movement, encouraging you to favour the affected parts, which will aid healing.

 

In short, endorphine release occurs at the time of the injury when you are under high physical/psychological stress in order to allow an individual to cope with the situation and to remove him/herself from danger. Once that has been achieved, the next thing is to heal, and pain makes us protect the affected areas which helps with healing and there is no endorphine release to dampen that pain.

[reverse]

thought of gaps?

 

the pain sensors in the skin are not equally dense all over the body.

 

could have missed a sensor.

 

gone in between two.