Nature Knows and Psionic Success
Brain Health and Willful Consciousness
( Natural News ) Believe it or not but pain can actually be a friend. It tells us something is wrong and that we should avoid it, like getting too close to the bonfire and hurting ourselves. It tells us to be careful when slicing vegetables, because we can hurt our fingers if we don’t watch out. Neuroscientists from the University of Pennsylvania concluded in a new research that animals suppress chronic pain when they are hungry , in an attempt to look for food and survive. The study zeroed in on 300 brain cells that prioritize the need for food to quell hunger, than the need to get over chronic pain. Amber L. Alhadeff, one of the researchers admitted that his team did not expect that hunger could influence the feeling of pain. But he realized it made sense. Animals must get nutrients from food first before they can even think of overcoming pain from injury. Curious about how hunger may interact with the sensation of pain, the researchers observed how mice that hadn’t eaten for 24 hours still responded to acute pain. But unlike their well-fed counterparts, hungry mice ignored pain caused by inflammation. Long-term pain from inflammation is thought to involve neural circuits in the brain. The researchers also discovered that hungry mice did not steer away from the place that brought them inflammatory pain . This made researchers wonder what part of the brain was behind the hunger-pain connection. They experimented on gouti-related protein (AgRP) neurons, which are believed to trigger hunger. They found out that mice responded less to chronic pain while retaining their reactions to severe pain. The researchers dug deeper and discovered that stimulating only a few hundred AgRP neurons markedly suppressed inflammatory pain. J. Nicholas Betley, assistant biology professor at the […]
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