Watching someone suffer extreme pain has a lasting effect on the brain

Image via Los Alamos National Laboratory/Flickr New research suggests that witnessing extreme pain – such as the injury or death of a comrade on the battlefield – has a lasting effect on how the brain processes potentially painful situations. The research team, chiefly from Bar-Ilan University and headed up by Moranne Eidelman-Rothman, investigated the brain using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Like more widely used fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), MEG localises which parts of the brain are more active during a particular mental activity, but it offers more fine-grained information about when this activity is occurring. This sensitivity helped the researchers detect subtle anomalies in how pain is perceived. Eidelman-Rothman’s participants were veterans of the Israeli Defence Force, 28 with battlefield experience, all of whom had been exposed to at least one event where a comrade was killed or seriously injured, and a control group of 16 veterans from noncombat units. The researchers scanned the participants’ brain activity while they viewed photographs of human hands and feet depicted in painful and non-painful situations, such as an axe directly striking the foot or striking a log a few inches away. Sample stimuli, taken from Eidelman-Rothman et al, 2016 The results, published in Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioural Neuroscience, revealed an important difference in the neural activation patterns in the veterans and the noncombatants. Among the cont...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Emotion Brain Source Type: blogs