Friedrich Schiller Jena University (Germany) neuroscientists proved that the words associated to the pain may intensify the activity of certain brain parts in those people having heard or seen these words.

In the previous researches a dependency between brain activity and presenting certain external incentives associated to the pain was shown. However these researches results didn’t gave a chance to make a conclusion that probationers reacted on the contents of the pictures presented or the words senses. It is quite possible that notions or pictures simply caused in people negative emotions that didn’t relate the feel of pain as it is.

The authors tried to eliminate this vagueness. They chose 40 adjectives and divided them into 4 equal groups: “positive”, “neutral”, “negative”, “pain related” ones. The last one included only those words that relate feel of pain straightly (for instance: “ache”, “acute” and “piercing”), at that this group clearly corresponded the “negative” adjectives according its emotional effect (“disgusting”, “vile”, “dirty” and so on).

8 men and 8 women took part in the experiments that were divided into two parts. The first one included presenting 16 different chains of 5 adjectives related to one of the groups. The people were asked to imagine certain situations or feelings associated to every word and after that they were offered to relate the 5 adjectives to this or that group. The second part of the experiments the volunteers were presented the same 16 chains but now they were given a task (intended to draw away their attention) – they had to count the general number of the vowels in the text block consisting of 5 words. The probationers’ brain activity was monitored by the scientists with the help of magnetic resonance tomography.

According to the results the adjectives associated with thee pain in the first experiment intensified the activity of the dorsolateral prefrontal brain cortex area, bottom of the postcentral convolution and the precuneus (the part of the medial great brain hemisphere surface). The words from the others groups didn’t caused any equal reaction.

Within the second experiment the typical changes of the activity that enable to distinguish pain related adjectives were registered in the other brain parts. Thomas Weiss – the experiment participant concludes that the data got show that the words are quite enough to stimulate brain structures that are involved into the pain signals processing. Probably we underestimated the effect of the dangerous stimulus.