Neuroscience
The sense of accomplishment from running a marathon is hugely uplifting. But let's not romanticise it, there's also a lot of pain involved. Despite this, many people pull on their running shoes time and again. A new study helps make sense of their behaviour – it turns out most marathon runners forget just how painful it was the last time.
Przemyslaw Bąbel recruited 62 runners (39 men) who took part in the 11th Cracovia Marathon in Cracow, Poland in 2012. Moments after they crossed the finishing line he asked them to complete a series of questionnaires about the intensity of the pain they were in, its unpleasantness, and the positive and negative emotions they were feeling. The key finding is that when he contacted them again, three or six months later, and asked them to recall how much pain they'd been in at the end of the marathon, most of them underestimated the pain they'd experienced, both in terms of its intensity and unpleasantness. For example, of those contacted six months later, they remembered the pain intensity as being around 3.2 on a 7-point scale, on average, whereas their actual average pain intensity rating after the marathon was 5.5.
Although the runners tended to underestimate their marathon pain, there was still a link between pain experienced and pain remembered – those who'd suffered more tended to remember the run as being more painful. Another key factor was negative emotion: those who reported feeling more emotions like distress and fear at the end of the marathon, tended to remember higher levels of pain and greater pain unpleasantness. This is consistent with what we know about pain experience having a powerful psychological component, influenced in part by context and a person's emotions. Other recent research has shown that, looking back, women tend to overestimate the pain they experienced after gynaecological surgery far more than after giving birth by caesarian section, presumably because the birth by caesarian, like completing a marathon, is an emotionally positive experience, whereas the gynaecological surgery is not.
How we remember pain is a relatively understudied area, yet it has important real-life applications, such as people's ability to report the effectiveness of pain relief treatments, which of course depends on recalling accurately their past pain. Bąbel said this is the first time anyone has studied the memory of pain in the context of exercise. Much remains to be investigated, such as the influence on pain memory of people's goals, expectations and emotions prior to painful exercise.
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Bąbel, P. (2015). Memory of pain induced by physical exercise Memory, 1-12 DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1023809
--further reading--
Why you're particularly likely to run your first marathon when your age ends in a "9"
Acceptance, not distraction, is the way to deal with pain
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Marathon runners forget how painful it was
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| Image: Flickr/Greg |
Przemyslaw Bąbel recruited 62 runners (39 men) who took part in the 11th Cracovia Marathon in Cracow, Poland in 2012. Moments after they crossed the finishing line he asked them to complete a series of questionnaires about the intensity of the pain they were in, its unpleasantness, and the positive and negative emotions they were feeling. The key finding is that when he contacted them again, three or six months later, and asked them to recall how much pain they'd been in at the end of the marathon, most of them underestimated the pain they'd experienced, both in terms of its intensity and unpleasantness. For example, of those contacted six months later, they remembered the pain intensity as being around 3.2 on a 7-point scale, on average, whereas their actual average pain intensity rating after the marathon was 5.5.
Although the runners tended to underestimate their marathon pain, there was still a link between pain experienced and pain remembered – those who'd suffered more tended to remember the run as being more painful. Another key factor was negative emotion: those who reported feeling more emotions like distress and fear at the end of the marathon, tended to remember higher levels of pain and greater pain unpleasantness. This is consistent with what we know about pain experience having a powerful psychological component, influenced in part by context and a person's emotions. Other recent research has shown that, looking back, women tend to overestimate the pain they experienced after gynaecological surgery far more than after giving birth by caesarian section, presumably because the birth by caesarian, like completing a marathon, is an emotionally positive experience, whereas the gynaecological surgery is not.
How we remember pain is a relatively understudied area, yet it has important real-life applications, such as people's ability to report the effectiveness of pain relief treatments, which of course depends on recalling accurately their past pain. Bąbel said this is the first time anyone has studied the memory of pain in the context of exercise. Much remains to be investigated, such as the influence on pain memory of people's goals, expectations and emotions prior to painful exercise.
_________________________________
Bąbel, P. (2015). Memory of pain induced by physical exercise Memory, 1-12 DOI: 10.1080/09658211.2015.1023809
--further reading--
Why you're particularly likely to run your first marathon when your age ends in a "9"
Acceptance, not distraction, is the way to deal with pain
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Acupuncturists Are Insensitive To Other People's Pain (in A Good Way!)
When we witness other people undergoing a painful experience, our brains respond as though we are experiencing that pain ourselves. We're simulating their trauma in our own pain pathways. This is pretty handy when it comes to empathy but could be...
- Imaging The Brain To Control The Mind
For the first time anywhere in the world, psychologists at California-based company Omneuron and Stanford University have demonstrated that people can be taught how to reduce their experience of pain with the aid of real-time images of their brain activity....
- Pain Research
From the NIH: Members of new Interagency Pain Research Coordinating Committee announced 13 February 2012 [snip] "The committee will work to identify critical gaps in basic and clinical research on the symptoms, causes, and treatment of pain and will recommend...
- Upcoming Videocast: The Neuroimaging Of Pain (07 Nov 2011)
From a press release from the NIH: Stanford researcher to speak at NIH on the role of neuroimaging in understanding pain NCCAM presents Opening Windows to the Brain: Lessons Learned in the Neuroimaging of Pain [snippet] What: Sean Mackey, M.D., Ph.D.,...
- Hyponatremia
Study Cautions Runners to Limit Their Water Intake The New York Times By GINA KOLATA Published: April 14, 2005 After years of telling athletes to drink as much liquid as possible to avoid dehydration, some doctors are now saying that drinking too much...