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Your Mind Creates Pain

By Daniel Kane
Science Magazine

When the focus is your own pain, substances with no pharmaceutical value sometimes provide relief. The “active ingredient” in placebo treatments is your brain, according to...Science (magazine).

“The experience of pain depends not only on sensory signals coming in, but on your emotional state and how you interpret those signals. Placebos could affect multiple aspects of the experience,” said study author Tor Wager, who recently moved from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor to Columbia University.

In a pair of experiments, subjects endured either shock or heat pains in order to test what they believed were pain-relieving creams. All of the creams were, in fact, placebos. Individuals who experienced pain relief from the creams returned for fMRI brain scans during placebo treatments.

Study participants who reported the greatest placebo-induced decreases in pain showed significantly decreased brain activity in certain pain-sensitive brain regions. Less brain activity in these areas seems to mean less pain.

Activity in some pain-sensitive regions did not drop when placebos relieved pain. This result strengthens the idea that placebos do not block the body’s sensory features that transmit pain from the skin to the brain. Instead, the brain modulates its interpretation of those signals.

When people who responded to placebos anticipated pain, there was a sharp rise in activation of a region of the brain linked to cognitive control, the prefrontal cortex.

“These findings acknowledge that pain is a psychologically constructed experience,” the authors write. The pain we feel seems to be a product of the sensory information we encounter and the unique ways in which we processes these sensations.

The scientists’ results challenge claims that placebo success stories reflect nothing but biased responses from study participants who somehow feel obligated to report benefits from placebo treatments.

In the future, Wager and his colleagues at Columbia, Michigan and Princeton -- including Edward Smith, Ken Casey, and Jonathan Cohen -- hope to learn just how far the effects of placebos reach inside your body.

“Can placebos, for example, improve immune responses or decrease signs of stress in the body?” Wager asked.

Source: MSNBC

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