London: A sportsman in the heat of moment plays on through pain even when it would floor anyone else. Similarly, some people seem to suffer from long-lasting pains when others are better able to cope. How can that be?

New research says that each of us experience pain differently at different times.
Irene Tracey's group at the Oxford Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (FMRI) of the Brain has used brain-imaging techniques for a number of years, aiming to provide an objective measure of individual experiences of pain.

The latest results demonstrate that people's personalities matter in their experience of pain. People who are more anxious or worried about feeling pain have differences in connectivity within their brains that make them more susceptible to actually feeling pain.

The team applied short laser pulses to the feet of 16 willing and healthy volunteers just at the point where they started to experience the pulses as being painful.

These brief laser pulses were applied 120 times to each volunteer, and around half the time the volunteer would declare it was painful and half the time not - even though the pulse was exactly the same every time, says an Oxford Centre release.

MRI brain scans during these experiments show that the volunteers' brains were more active in pain-processing regions when they described the laser pulses as being painful - so this was a real experience and not down to any report bias or arte-fact. These findings were reported in PNAS.

-- IANS