today in idle reading about pain

[kaberett]

Pain associated with sensory hypersensitivity, e.g. light and sound: is this primarily nociceptive (i.e. nociceptors are firing at a lower threshold) or a feature of central processing (i.e. brain goes "NOPE DON'T LIKE THAT" about stimuli the peripheral nervous system isn't reporting as Harmful)? Or, slightly more comprehensibly to people who are not currently spending lots of time thinking about this particular niche area, when normal light levels cause me pain, is that the nerves that go "YOU'RE LOOKING AT THE SUN AND IT'S A BAD IDEA STOP THAT RIGHT NOW" that are initiating those signals, or a... central... processing... issue... yeah okay maybe I should go to bed instead of trying to words this. BUT a quick shakedown of the internet revealed it's only in the last decade or so that nociceptive signalling relating to Loud Noise Bad has been demonstrated so that's cool.

Comments

[redsixwing]

oh neat, thank you for the link.

As a person whose "OMG THE SUN" threshold is altogether too low, I'm interested in this.

[steorra]

The distinction makes sense to me, and it is an interesting question.

[silveradept]

That is a very interesting question, and I hope someone can come up with an experiment that will provide some answers to it.

[ludy]

I think I more or less understand the question but am almost definitely missing some nuance … but I think it is prolly more likely to be a central/brain thing because everyone I know who has any flavour of too loud/too bright/too whatever pain has more than one flavour of it. But maybe that just means we have a bunch of nerves that are set to respond at lower than typical levels?