It's reassuring to know doctors can "switch off" the part of their brain that appreciates pain
. What good is a squeamish heart surgeon, after all?
A study carried out by Jean Decety, at the University of Chicago, adds new meaning to the old adage "control your emotions". He used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to examine the brains of doctors and ordinary volunteers as they watched a video of people being pricked with acupuncture needles.
In non-doctors, these brain scans revealed a spike in neural activity in areas of the brain associated with feeling pain, like the somatosensory cortex
and anterior insula
. Physicians, on the other hand, did not show any increased activity in these areas while watching footage of people being pricked. Doctors also rated the pain they saw on screen less sympathetically: 3 out of 10 on average, compared to 7 out of 10 on average for the non-physicians.
Decety says doctors must learn this trick in order to focus on their job. "They have learned through their training and practice to keep a detached perspective. Without such a mechanism," Decety says. "Performing their practice could be overwhelming or distressing, and, as a consequence, impair their ability to be of assistance for their patients."
I wonder if people in other professions routinely suppress one part of the brain while boosting other regions? Perhaps fire-fighters suppress the part that processes fear, and parking attendants suppress the part that makes them sympathetic.Roxanne Khamsi, online reporter
Labels: being human, health, human brain