Some people claim to experience pain just watching something painful to happen. In complex regional pain syndrome (CRPS) patients, both own movements and just observing other persons’ movements may aggravate the pain. Researchers in Aalto University, Finland, found that when CRPS patients feel pain caused by observing other person’s movements, their brains display abnormal activation in many such areas that respond to normal physical pain. Thus the pain that the CRPS patients felt during movement observation presented similarities to the “normal” pain associated with tissue damage.
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