What is the stinging feeling when you get something salty in a wound. What is the cellular pathway and why have we developed it?
In: Biology
From the top answer to this exact same question asked before:
“Salt is sodium chloride. Your nerve cells communicate partially using sodium. When a bunch of sodium rushes into a nerve cell, it “fires”.
The salt that gets into the wound dissolves (splits into individual sodium and chloride), and because there’s so much of it, the sodium rushes into nearby nerve cells, overloading them and causing them to fire.
There are some nerve cells that are specialized to detect pain. Since the nerves that detect pain are constantly sending signals to the brain because they’re overloaded with sodium, your brain interprets the constant signal as constant pain.”
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