I’ve searched this up and thought about it and all I can think of is a blood vessel in the brain. But that still doesn’t explain why when people have concussions or get head injuries, they feel pain. So what is a headache or where is this pain coming from if there aren’t any pain receptors in the brain. Nervous system? Are there actual pain receptors?
In: Biology
The pain doesn’t come from the brain, it comes from pain receptors elsewhere. In fact, this is the case for most organs in your body. When you have a stomach ache, you don’t really feel it *inside* your stomach, just in that general area. Most of the time you couldn’t pinpoint exactly where either, unlike if you poked yourself in the tummy with a toothpick. What happens is the organ borrows the pain receptors of specific nearby areas, and sort of projects it there. Headaches are the same.
The brain doesn’t have pain receptors but the the rest of your head does. Both the inside and the outside of your skull can feel pain.
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As others have explained much better than I, its not really the brain itself that feels pain but the blood vessels surrounding it. One common cause of headaches, for example, has nothing to do with the head but when the sinuses are inflamed. This causes them to swell and put pressure on the nerves in the skull and neck, similar with a concussion, its the swelling putting pressure on veins and arteries that causes the pain. There’s an excellent TedEd on the subject of headaches that gives an illustrated view of how things work!
Most headaches are a mixture of different trigeminovascular dysfunctions. The brain indeed does not have any pain receptors, that’s why a stroke is absolutely painless.
If the brain doesn’t have any pain receptors, then why is this question posted every week?
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