Brain-imaging study shows ‘hot spot’ that may explain why African Americans feel greater pain

To be Black in America is to literally feel greater pain than non-Hispanic white people and Latinxs do — at least if the pain is being inflicted by a white man wearing a white coat, if it’s happening in a lab, if it follows years of racial discrimination, and if the findings of a sobering study reported on Monday are correct.

Despite the persistence of the slavery-era myth that African Americans are less sensitive to pain than people of other backgrounds (as a large fraction of white laypeople, medical students, and hospital residents in a 2016 believed), the science from the identical stimulus (being touched with something very hot, for instance) than non-Hispanic white people. Yet somewhat surprisingly, when it seems that every mental and emotional experience has been analyzed with brain imaging, the neurobiological mechanisms for that heightened pain sensitivity have been unclear.