Not Much Grey Matter? You're Probably Immune to Pain
My husband thinks I'm a freak of nature and sometimes, I have to agree. He can't believe my pain threshold, though I have to admit, the three tries (five attempts each) to jam my wristbone back into its socket (the first two times without morphine) did make me nauseous. I'm a tank, he says, like my father, who drove himself to the hospital while having a heart attack. But scientists are learning there's a little more to it than that. A recent study found that that the brain’s structure is related to how intensely people perceive pain. Turns out I have a lot of grey matter in my brain. “We found that individual differences in the amount of grey matter in certain regions of the brain are related to how sensitive different people are to pain,” said Robert Coghill, Ph.D., professor of neurobiology and anatomy at Wake Forest Baptist and senior author of the study, at newswise.com. The brain is made up of both grey and white matter. Grey matter processes...