It hurts!!

Sprained ankles, skinned knees, stomach cramps of all kinds, heartache, headaches, middle ear infections... It's amazing what humans endure in the course of their lives. And it's always about signaling a problem to the central nervous system that needs to be dealt with as quickly as possible. Since we only have one body and it needs to last as long as possible, pain is by nature more of a feature than a bug. It just doesn't seem that way to us.

Not all pain is the same. Some abdominal pain is dull and difficult to locate. Just one organ further on, we recognize the painful spot immediately, just as we would with a skin injury. And in fact, the body treats hollow organs in the same way as the skin, as the outside of the body. But that is only one of the many peculiarities of pain.

The older we get, the more we suffer from pain. In the case of chronic and neuropathic pain, this is due to a misguided learning process, a misconnection of nerve cells, which is of particular interest to researchers. As is the question of when pain actually becomes pain: only in the brain? Or even before that? In cooperation with CRC 1158, we are investigating questions such as these.

Begin your journey through pain with the introduction by Nora Schultz.