Pain memory

The pain memory compares the acute pain with stored pain experiences and then makes an assessment. Behavior and reactions to pain have consequences that influence the likelihood of occurrence.

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Intense, repeated, or prolonged pain, like all other life experiences, changes the activity of genes in the nerve cells of the brain . As a result, there are changes in connections ( synapses ) and the restructuring of nerve cell networks.

Pain memory is distinguished as:

• Explicit memory: memories of the type and intensity of past pain are rather imprecise.
• Implicit associative memory: Classical and operant conditioning processes are assumed for the formation
• Implicit non-associative memory: It is assumed that repeated pain stimulation leads to peripheral sensitization (peripheral pain memory) and central sensitization (central pain memory). This is a peculiarity of the nociceptive system, especially since otherwise the repeated presentation of sensory stimuli often leads to habituation .

See also

• Phantom pain

Individual evidence

1. ↑ University of Heidelberg : The pain and its memory publication from 01/2002, accessed on May 4, 2015
2. ↑ Ralf Baron, Wolfgang Koppert, Michael Strumpf, Anne Willweber-Strumpf: Practical pain medicine: Interdisciplinary diagnostics - multimodal therapy . Springer-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-642-37605-4 , pp. 8–12 ( limited preview in Google Book search).

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