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Nerves are not wires

 •  • by Paul Ingraham
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Weekly nuggets of pain science news and insight, usually 100-300 words, with the occasional longer post. The blog is the “director’s commentary” on the core content of PainScience.com: a library of major articles and books about common painful problems and popular treatments. See the blog archives or updates for the whole site.

Here’s an interesting example of how “wiring” and “plumbing” analogies only go so far in biology. Notice the nerve movement in this little imaging video:

If those optic nerves were wires, you could heat ‘em up and break ‘em by watching a tennis match. But of course nerves are much more robust than wires! We don’t get overuse injuries of the optic nerve.