(www.neomundo.com.ar) the well-known reflection to one part of the body that hurts the hand is really useful, already that touching himself in an area that experiences acute pain alleviates suffering, he concluded a new investigation.

The authors of the University College of London (United Kingdom), who published their findings in the journal Current Biology, they explained that this relief comes very coordinated changes taking place in the brain.

Pain is a sensation that triggers the nervous system. Although it is very difficult to cope with, especially if it is strong, it fulfils a function that warns that an area of the body is suffering damage and you treated her with care.

Relief and pain

to investigate the reflection to hand a painful area, the authors worked with the so-called “thermal illusion”. Patrick Haggard said that “thermal illusion is one of the most recognized laboratory methods to study the perception of pain.”

Scientists put fingers, index and ring of volunteers in hot water and plunged the finger of the environment in cold water. “This creates the paradoxical feeling of the middle toe burning so much it hurts,” allowing specialists to investigate pain without causing any real damage.

In the experiment, the authors generated this pain in both hands of the volunteers and then asked that the three fingers of one hand with the other three touched. The result was that the painful experience decreased by 64% in the played area.

This relief was not reached when the volunteers played with one or two fingers, not when someone else covered the area hurt.

“In summary, pain decreased when information of the heat and three fingers touch was completely integrated.” “I.e. the relief required a highly coherent sensory pattern which included thermal and tactile patterns as well as coherence in the stimuli in both hands,” said the authors.

Haggard said that pain is a very important but also complicated experience. “We have shown that the level of acute pain depends not only on the signals sent to the brain but how the brain integrates these signals into a coherent representation of the body as a whole”, concluded.

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