Words Can Be Painful Too

Pain is something that has for a long time been associated with external stimuli. Usually, sticks and stones do cause pain, while other times people's feelings cause the same effect, only on the inside. But while these situations have been carefully investigated before, one area of pain study has remained largely unobserved for many years. In a new set of experiments, scientists finally took a closer look at how the mere hearing of words related to pain can affect the human brain, LiveScience reports.

The investigation demonstrated using advanced brain imaging methods that words too can affect a feature of the human brain called the pain matrix, which is essentially the place where memories about painful experiences are being kept for future reference. The team behind the study learned that using pain-related words, including “grueling,” “tormenting,” and “plaguing,” had the same effect on the matrix as actually witnessing the actions. The new study investigated the pain response of 16 volunteers in order to arrive to these conclusions.

The work was conducted by German psychology researchers at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, who asked the participants to read words related to pain. At the same time, the test subjects were asked to imagine hypothetical situations that corresponded to each of the individual word they read. After the first instance of the experiments was complete, the subjects were asked to do it again, but this time, their attention was distracted while they were doing so. Throughout both studies, the test subjects were hooked up to a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machine. The device is capable of determining the blood flow in the brain, showing which areas activate at any given time.

“There was an activation in the pain matrix to pain words,” study team member Dr. Thomas Weiss says. “In both cases, we could observe a clear activation of the pain matrix in the brain by pain-associated words,” adds Maria Richter, an author of the new study. What also stood out from the study was that words, which had little to do with the concept of pain, such as “disgusting,” “terrifying” and “horrible,” did not have the activation effect on the brain's pain matrix. The German group says more work is needed to validate the results, given the small study sample. They add, however, that this is typical of brain-imaging investigations.