"Weekend Psychological Talk" girls are more likely to endure physical pain! Because they will forget.

"If men were allowed to have children in the afterlife, human beings would have been extinct! The meaning of this sentence is that women can endure pain especially, but men can't endure any pain. Although it is a joke, psychologists have really confirmed through experiments that men are particularly easy to remember their "painful" experiences.

Men are particularly easy to remember their own "pain". In the past, women were considered to be more sensitive to pain and their tolerance for pain would decrease. But in fact, in psychological observation, men are more impressed by the negative memory brought by pain than women. A team study by McGill, a professor at the University of Toronto in Mississauga, Canada, found that as long as a man has suffered once, he will think that he can't stand it if he thinks about it again.

They selected 465,438+0 men and 38 women, took them to a specific room, asked them to put a tourniquet on their arms and began to do muscle strength training. The process lasted for 20 minutes, and the subjective recognition score of the pain they felt was 1 ~ 100. The tourniquet will shrink more and more tightly, so only seven people think that the score is less than 50 points, and others think that there is more than half of the pain.

The next day, the research team took these people back to the same or different rooms and told them that they needed to do the same experiment as yesterday. As a result, people who returned to their original rooms thought that "the degree of pain was higher than yesterday" even if the degree of pain was the same, and the average value was higher than that of women.

"For men, the painful experience in memory has strengthened their pain, and' expected pain' has become a kind of pressure. Although it is understandable to feel more painful the next day, I didn't expect men to be more prone to this situation. I think the pain is really related to my own memory, because men and women have different memory styles. " McGill said.

In addition to humans, McGill's team also did the same experiment on mice, replacing the subjective feeling of pain with the speed of jumping away from pain. It was found that male mice had the same memory pain as men, and the related results were published in Contemporary Biology.

In order to prove that pain is related to memory, McGill's team injected mice with drugs that block memory, and found that mice interrupted by painful memories did not feel particularly painful. McGill believes that this is why chronic pain always makes patients uncomfortable, because over time, they will not get used to pain, but will feel more and more pain.

Dr Elizabeth A. Heller of the university of Pennsylvania said that they found that mice have different memories of pain or fear because there is a gene "Cdk5" responsible for creating memories of fear or stress. When male mice suffer, this gene will be activated, while female mice will not. There seems to be a natural barrier that blocks these unpleasant memories.

McGill's team believes that this may be an entry point for the treatment of chronic pain in the future, directly blocking related pain memories, making patients more tolerant of pain and helping them find ways to relieve pain other than painkillers.