Why is it when you stub your toe (or something similar), your body takes a moment to realise that it is in pain?
In: Biology
Irrelevant but related still, I saw some bio hack wherein if you look away from your feet the moment you realize you hurt your foot you won’t feel the pain as much. Maybe what they really meant was the you’d only feel the latent pain.
Electricity is fast but still takes a second to get to the computer in your head that says ouch.
WHile nerves use electrical impulses to transmit information, the speed of transmission along a nerve is not at the speed of light. It actually takes a measurable time for the pain signal to travel from your toe to your brain, while you get the information more quickly through other channels, like your eyes or other nerves. You feel the thump all through your body as a sound wave, which is faster than your neve impulse from your foot, so your sense of touch sends that info on from places higher up than your foot and the info gets to your brain before the actual nerve impulse from your foot does. So you have that moment when you know you stubbed your toe but the actual pain signal hasn’t got to your brain yet.
There are different sorts of nerves, like wires, in your body. Some of those nerve wires let electric signals are faster than others. The kind in your toes are the slow kind.
Touch and pain don’t travel at the the same speed. You feel that something just fell on your toe but it doesn’t register in your brain as pain until a micro-nano second later. It’s still really, really close…but plenty of time to get out a good MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!
There are also conditions that slows down data transfer like the Charcot Marie-Tooth disease.
I don’t have time right now to Google the exact nerve type conducting the signal. But some things can be sensed in nerves that travel slower like for got example Tactile or touch receptors (mechanoceptors) when activated signal via A beta nerves which have a diameter of 6 to 12 micrometers. Temperature on the other hand is sensed by thermoceptors that signal via A delta (1 to 5 micrometer diameter) and C (0.2 to 0.5 micrometer diameter) fibers. Due to the laws of physics, the narrower the nerve the higher the resistance, the slower the signal. That’s why Touch signals travel at 35 to 75 meters per second while temperature signals travel at 0.5 to 2 meters per second.
Some nerves like type C also don’t have myelin sheath. Which is this fatty layer surrounding neurons. It functions to reduce leak and insulate, making signal transduction much faster. Actually many types of chronic pain signal with those. But I’m just not sure about acute pain right now.
Pain signals travel surprisingly slowly through your body. It’s tempting to think that since pain signals work using something akin to electricity (albeit chemical), they should move at the speed of light or thereabouts, but that’s not how it works.
For example, in the time that your nerves can transmit a pain signal the length of two football fields (around 240 meters), a Saturn V rocket can shoot up to an altitude of 68 km.
Also, once you’ve realized that a certain part of your body is in pain, why does it continue to send pain signals? Like. I get it!!
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