Why would painkillers alter or reduce emotional pain in addition to physical pain? The authors point to a study that monitored what’s happening in the brain: Participants played a game in the lab that asked two players to exclude the third. The excluded participants’ brains were scanned during this time, and it turned out that one area of the brain was more active as they experienced the pain of rejection — the same area that’s active when we’re experiencing physical pain. So it may be that physical and emotional pain are in some ways one and the same, neurologically speaking.
No comments:
Post a Comment