Do skull bones have pain nerves (nociceptors)? I recently attended an awake brain surgery for deep brain stimulation and it seemed to me that only the skin surrounding the drilled hole got local anaesthesia. I know that the brain itself does not have nociceptors, but what about the skull? And how does this compare to other bones in the body? Would you feel a hole being drilled in your skull? Would you feel your leg being chopped off if the surrounding tissue was numbed?

Thanks for your answer Alexandria,

As you didn't seem entirely confident about the innervation in the skull bone, I ended up asking the neurosurgeon, and she indeed only anaesthetises the skin surrounding the drill hole and the subcutaneous tissue as the bone does not have nociceptive innervation in that area. So you are right for the leg: if chopped off, you would still feel the pain from the nerves in the bone. In the case of deep brain stimulation however, the skull does not have nociceptive innervation in the area where the holes are drilled.

This leaves the question of why there are some exceptions to bone innervation, but that's a problem for another day.