system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5: Shaking hand/finger wounds

Why does shaking your hands briefly reprieve the pain from its wounds? I had a big gash in my thumb and I've ways shaken them a bit to help ease the pain, but I don't know why exactly I started doing it or how people discovered it.
gpt
It’s called Sensory Gating. Basically, the brain can only register a limited amount of sensation at a time, so when gets overwhelmed by a sudden pain in one area, our instinct is to rub/shake/scratch/etc the area to distract our brain from that initial pain. It doesn’t fix the pain, it just mitigates it temporarily with a better, less intense feeling. Then, hopefully, once you’re done shaking/rubbing/scratching the area, the initial pain has lessened to a more tolerable level.