Imagine that you have caught the flu. Obviously, you feel sick. That means you want to stay in bed, you don’t want to eat or talk to relatives and friends and see everything a little darker than before falling ill. Youl also notice that you have a fever.
You will think that the symptoms are due to the flu virus causing you physical weakness and that feeling sick is only the expression of that weakness.
It’s a seemingly correct conclusion but, actually, what happens is something else. The whole picture of discomfort created by the infection can be reproduced by administering a molecule, the lipopolysaccharide, found in the capsule of a bacterium, that is, without causing any infection.
The symptoms of illness that forced you to behave as sick are generated by the turn on of a cerebral program known as cerebral disease response. In the presence of an infection, the affected (necrosated) tissues release, through immune system cells, messenger molecules (cytokines) to the brain and activate the program.
The same program can be activated in a healthy mouse if we apply these messengers (cytokines) of its sick partner to its brain. If a false message of illness arrives to the brain, it activates the corresponding program automatically. No matter how healthy the mouse is, it will feel sick and behave as such.
Imagine a society of mice with doctor mice that evaluate the symptoms and make analysis and X-rays. The healthy mouse with the unnecessarily activated program would tell its symptoms: "I'm tired, everything hurts, I’m not hungry, I want to stay at home, my mind feels so dense ...". All the analysis results would be normal and the doctor mouse would conclude: "everything is normal, I can’t find anything that’s wrong...", to which the healthy mouse with the active disease program would answer: “well, I feel awful, I must have something...". "I don’t I make up the symptoms."
The program of being sick is also activated in the baby mice if their mother abandons them and, as you may have noticed already, its expression corresponds to what someone feels when he or she is depressed or has fibromyalgia.
The brain contains multiple programs to produce the full range of comfort and discomfort perceptions.
If, for example, the brain turns the hunger program on, you feel like if you haven’t eaten in several days, but it hasn’t been more than two hours since you ate the snack and you are a bit overweight.
When the brain decides to activate disease programs is in order to make us act as if we were sick, even though we aren’t.
Why does it act like this? What is the point of feeling sick if we are not?
The brain is a hypotheses builder. It anticipates the events hastily. If fear of disease reaches the alert level, it’s not required to produce the disease so we feel ill. The fact that the program was activated is enough.
Disease symptoms are not caused by weakness, but by "illness behavior”, the program that encourages us, through the symptoms, to behave as sick.
The brain is not infallible. It overestimates danger and that can cause us many problems. One of them is feeling sick when we are healthy.
- I've been to the doctor’s office to see the analysis results. He told me that everything is normal and that what I have is psychological ...
You will think that the symptoms are due to the flu virus causing you physical weakness and that feeling sick is only the expression of that weakness.
It’s a seemingly correct conclusion but, actually, what happens is something else. The whole picture of discomfort created by the infection can be reproduced by administering a molecule, the lipopolysaccharide, found in the capsule of a bacterium, that is, without causing any infection.
The symptoms of illness that forced you to behave as sick are generated by the turn on of a cerebral program known as cerebral disease response. In the presence of an infection, the affected (necrosated) tissues release, through immune system cells, messenger molecules (cytokines) to the brain and activate the program.
The same program can be activated in a healthy mouse if we apply these messengers (cytokines) of its sick partner to its brain. If a false message of illness arrives to the brain, it activates the corresponding program automatically. No matter how healthy the mouse is, it will feel sick and behave as such.
Imagine a society of mice with doctor mice that evaluate the symptoms and make analysis and X-rays. The healthy mouse with the unnecessarily activated program would tell its symptoms: "I'm tired, everything hurts, I’m not hungry, I want to stay at home, my mind feels so dense ...". All the analysis results would be normal and the doctor mouse would conclude: "everything is normal, I can’t find anything that’s wrong...", to which the healthy mouse with the active disease program would answer: “well, I feel awful, I must have something...". "I don’t I make up the symptoms."
The program of being sick is also activated in the baby mice if their mother abandons them and, as you may have noticed already, its expression corresponds to what someone feels when he or she is depressed or has fibromyalgia.
The brain contains multiple programs to produce the full range of comfort and discomfort perceptions.
If, for example, the brain turns the hunger program on, you feel like if you haven’t eaten in several days, but it hasn’t been more than two hours since you ate the snack and you are a bit overweight.
When the brain decides to activate disease programs is in order to make us act as if we were sick, even though we aren’t.
Why does it act like this? What is the point of feeling sick if we are not?
The brain is a hypotheses builder. It anticipates the events hastily. If fear of disease reaches the alert level, it’s not required to produce the disease so we feel ill. The fact that the program was activated is enough.
Disease symptoms are not caused by weakness, but by "illness behavior”, the program that encourages us, through the symptoms, to behave as sick.
The brain is not infallible. It overestimates danger and that can cause us many problems. One of them is feeling sick when we are healthy.
- I've been to the doctor’s office to see the analysis results. He told me that everything is normal and that what I have is psychological ...
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