Touch and Pain Flashcards
pain
unpleasant sensory & emotional experience
- serves to protect us
interoception
provide brain info about our own body
- hunger, thirst, temperature, pain
- representation of “the material me”
- foundation of feelings, emotion, and self awareness
exteroception
sense of the external world, of all stimulation originating from outside our own body
somatosensory receptors send info to CNS using 4 methods
- cutaneous sense (senses of skin)
- proprioception (body position)
- Kinesthesis (body movement)
- nociception (pain, discomfort)
transduction
converting physical energy into neural energy
three main groups of receptors
- mechanoreceptors (stroking, stretching, vibration of skin)
- thermoreceptors (responding to cold/hot temp)
- chemoreceptors (responding to certain types of chemicals)
nociceptors
fire specifically to potentially tissue-damaging stimuli
A-fibres
fast conducting sensory nerves with myelinated axons
- project senses to somatosensory cortex
C-pain or A-fibres
convey noxious, thermal, heat signals
touch
crucial for human development
- decreases stress hormone
c-fibres
respond to genetic touch
c-tactile fibres
convey gentle touch, light stroking
social touch hypothesis
proposes that C-tactile fibres form a system for touch perception that supports social bonding
motivation-decision model
brain automatically & continuously evaluates pros and cons of any situation
descending pain and modulating system
top down system involving several parts of the brainstem
- inhibits nociceptive signalling so that the more important actions can be attended to
