In recent years, we’ve been more aware as a collective of what makes us uncomfortable, and the triggers that can be found in all aspects of everyday life.

Understanding that allows us to take better care of ourselves and our loved ones – and that’s one reason why trigger warnings have started to become more commonplace in books, articles, films and

TV. There’s even websites that you can search to understand if a certain film contains specific triggers – it’s also best practice for teachers to include them at the start of potentially triggering lessons too.

Case in point: this article discusses bodily injury in popular media.

One particularly common trigger is bodily injury. And even if you’ve not suffered trauma, there’s a good chance that if you see someone getting injured in a film or read it in a book, you find that you feel it yourself in a way, too.

This is something that a research team from the University of Reading, Free University Amsterdam, and the University of Minnesota sought to understand for the first time in a recent study, which was published in the journal Nature.

To try to understand this phenomenon once and for all, the researchers studied the brains of participants who were watching films including Inception, Home Alone, and The Social Network.

And their results were astounding. As they observed some of the horrifying injuries suffered by the intruders in Home Alone, for example, the team could see the participants’ own bodies responding to the pain.

How? Well it turns out that while watching something on screen, your body actually imitates the sensations, as the University of Reading’s Dr Nicholas Hedger explained in a statement:

“When you watch someone being tickled or getting hurt, areas of the brain that process touch light up in patterns that match the body part involved. Your brain maps what you see onto your own body, ’simulating’ a touch sensation even though nothing physical happened to you.”

Of course, our bodies didn’t evolve specifically to watch movies. What seems like an unusual pattern of brain and bodily activity actually has a clear purpose, as Dr Hedger continued:

“This cross-talk works in the other direction too. For example, when you navigate to the bathroom in the dark, touch sensations help your visual system create an internal map of where things are, even with minimal visual input. This ‘filling in’ reflects our different senses cooperating to generate a coherent picture of the world.”

Our brains truly are fascinating.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about 50 amazing finds on Google Earth.