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mcurrie's picture

Pain and Corollary Discharge

As we talked about corollary discharge and its connection to phantom limb and feeling pain in their nonexistent limb I was thinking about pain. Like when you get a cut or some child scrapes their knee and doesn't feel the pain. But when someone points out they have a cut and the person looks down then the cut starts to hurt and with children they have the sudden reaction to cry. Why when we get the cut is there no pain? I can understand that when looking at a cut the corollary discharge would tell the body that is it hurt and that the body should feel pain and so you then experience pain. But what about before looking at the cut? What is blocking the feeling of pain? You could also see this when children fall and parents make a face. Sometimes the kid is fine and as long as their parents don't make a sad or weird face the kid laughs and goes on with playing. But when someone makes a face and asks the child if their fine they start crying knowing that they should be hurt. Is this corollary discharge of placing a certain face and voice to being hurt and so tell the child their hurt and should start crying? Then this still opens the question of what is pain? What makes us feel pain? Is it corollary discharge, a central pattern, something else or a complex of patterns, neurons, chemicals? 

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