Week 6

This week’s topic of discussion is pain and gustation. The gustation section of the chapter is rather short and we did not spend a ton of time in lecture on it so I will talk about pain.

There are many different types of pain. Some specific examples from Eric’s lecture are pain from gallstones, pain from kidney stones, pain from childbirth, and pain from having your skull cracked by a plate stemming from an argument over french fries. With so many different types of pain it is important to have a good definition of pain and the process of getting that definition was not quick. Eric was in attendance at the 1993 World Congress where they had “The Great Pain Debate” in which professionals from all around the world argued over what pain should be defined as. Apparently it was like a week long ordeal. Either way the end result was this definition of pain: an unpleasant physical or emotional experience associate with actual or potential tissue damage or described in terms of such damage.

There are three components to pain. There is the sensory component that most people think of when they hear the word “pain”, there is the emotional component of pain and there is also the cognitive evaluative component of pain. In the 1960s Ronald Melzack became the first person to start thinking about pain in this way and there is physiological and anatomical evidence to support that. The sensory part of pain is mediated by a pathway from the spinal cord, through the ventral posterolateral thalamus and to the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex. The immediate emotional response is mediated by a pathway that reaches the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the insular cortex. The long-term emotional component or the cognitive evaluative component reaches into the prefrontal cortex. I just love how complicated pain processing is and how many different areas of the brain are involved. Pain is super important for our survival because if we did not feel pain we would not have any positive punishments to tell us when we have done something deleterious to our health and are way more likely to continue that behavior until we die. That importance is definitely reflected in the physiological and anatomical structure of pain.