Hello Again,
Glad I found the boards here, so many questions. This one is a bit personal to me. I broke my back years ago and since have been in chronic terrible pain. To manage the pain I must take meds everyday and will probably do so for the rest of my life, unless there is some medical breakthrough.
The question I have is why are our brains incappable of turning of certian stimuli on command? I realize that pain is a warning to the brain that something is wrong or telling it that there is an injury. Seems to me it is like an alarm clock except there is no snooze button. Why is it not possible to “make” your brain stop proccessing the pain? Almost like telling the brain, thanks for the information, I am aware of it you don’t need to notify me any longer.
I am amazed that for all we can do we seem to have so little control over our brains, maybe some people have the ability to do this, but I haven’t heard of any.
I think it can. Most Americans just aren’t brought up with the world view / training to do so. Haven’t you seen performers sticking sharp things in their body or hanging from hooks? It might be hard to turn off the signal but it’s not that hard to “reinterpret” it.
In image burned into my mind was when I was around 12 (~1970), watching the Mike Douglas Show. He had a guest claiming he could “ignore” pain, and proceeded to stick a darning needle through his upper arm and continued to sit there and chat with Mike. I have heard other opinions since then that this sort of thing is a trick (I also saw Harry Anderson on SNL saw a needle back and forth under the surface of the skin of his forearm as blood leaked out, all the while saying, “Don’t worry, this is a trick. It’s a trick!”).
But I know from personal experience as a headache sufferer that with time and practice you can train your brain to do this to at least some degree, although my degree of success has been too limited to impale myself with large needles without flinching. First I have to focus on the pain and concentrate to localize it, then I can “turn it off” to some extent. As **jackdavinci **describes, I still experience the sensation but am able to disconnect the sensation from the visceral reaction that goes with it. But I can’t do it for severe or sudden-onset pain (e.g., stubbing my toe), or pain that comes and goes.
This may be true and is why I said in my OP that I am sure that some people have the ability. However I think my question was more along the lines of why do we not possess the ability to make mental decision to immediatly stop certian stimuli? Why can’t an average person “tell” his brain, I got it - you can stop now?
Because your brain can’t hear you over your nervous system shouting “Fuck, this hurts!” Pain can be very unpleasant but it’s necessary from an evolutionary standpoint - not that your specific pain is necessary for your survival and I’m sorry your’re in discomfort, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it doesn’t matter that it’s inconvenient for you in particular. If you could totally shut off your ability to feel pain, you could get into a lot of trouble. To this point at least, it has not been worthwhile for us to evolve the ability to shut down our ability to feel pain. That ability may evolve if it confers some advantage over the way the rest of us experience pain. That’s separate from particular individuals training their bodies to do something else.
The level of consciousness where we are aware of ourselves and our bodies is a relatively new development, evolutionarily speaking. If you’ll excuse a huge amount of anthropomorphizing, our bodies couldn’t trust our brains to use such power responsibly until very recently. Hell, for most of us, a lot of the time we still shouldn’t be trusted with such power.
An animal with the ability to ignore or turn off pain would be highly likely to die. Just because that we think we’re now able to make good decisions about what to do doesn’t mean we’re going to suddenly evolve that ability.
The ultimate explanation would involve showing that animals that can shut off the pain experience had fewer descendants than those who could not. I have no idea how you could go about establishing such a claim. I heard that there are very rare individuals who do not feel pain and their lives tend to be short because they stop before damage happens. That’s the extreme case.
IANA Doctor, but I presume that whatever happened to you would have eventually killed you if you lived anytime before the last century or so. From nature’s viewpoint, your situation is not a legitimate situation, and so it has not taken it into account.
Just think how much we would damage our bodies if we could turn off pain. How often would athletes turn off pain and keep playing while destroying vital ligaments and muscles that need healing? From athletes to children to drunks, we as a human race would be terrible decision makers when to “eliminate” the pain.
Oh, there is no doubt, even though my thoughts on my surgeries and the outcome lead me to believe that we are still in the barbaric stage of medical sience. Even still, without modern medical interventin I would have ceased to be here a long time ago.
To clairify my point a bit further, I don’t think it is a good idea to turn pain off in general. Anyone who lives without the abiity to feel pain would never be aware of mortal danger in their lives, and be dead quickly. I was thinking more on the lines of once pain is felt, once the brain is aware that my back is in pain, why can’t I stop that particular message from getting through? Reset the pain alarm for the next incident. As mentioned in my OP, a snooze button for a particular injury. Essentially, I am aware that my back is injured and knowing that I should be smart enough to keep from doing things that will injure it further. I just don’t need the reminder 24/7.
Your nervous system doesn’t know that it’s a particular injury, I don’t think. That’s something your conscious mind knows. It seems to me that if your brain could do this, it would do it by turning off the input from a particular nerve or pathway or something. Once that’s off, it’s off, and when you turn it back on, you’d feel the same pain. I am not sure what mechanism there could be for turning off only the pain from a particular injury.
The work of Dr Paul Brand elucidates this. While studying leprosy patients in India, he discovered that the damage to the body was not caused directly by the disease but by the effects of repeated injuries ignored because of the loss of the pain sensation.
There is some legit research (sorry no cites) to the effect that (some / most / ???) chronic pain isn’t even pain. It’s a bad mental habit, like worrying.
In effect your mind gets stuck in a loop remembering the pain. Nothing is really going on at the injury site.
Tinnitus, or persistent ringing in the ears, is thought by some to be similar. The theory holds that it isn’t a bogus nerve signal coming out of the cochlea; it’s a bogus feedback signal inside the brain / mind.
This theory explains why typical pain meds are ineffective against chronic pain. Even stopping all nerve sensation from the injury site will do nothing to solve a problem that’s totally mental (if below the level of conscious control).
I don’t have any expertise in this stuff & no ability to decide whether these theories are fact, probably fact, misguided bunk, or pure woo. The sources I’d read were reasonably reputable mainstream researchers.
Because, if you could do that, most people would turn off all pain most of the time. There is a condition that makes people unable to feel pain. People who have it tend to do things like bite off the tips of their tongues, and let broken bones and infections go untreated.
I was going to mention this guy. He did a lot of interesting work with pain and injury while studying leprosy.
He experimented by equipping some leprosy patients with devices that would send painful shocks to areas of their body that still had sensation if they did something that a normal person would know to stop doing because it started hurting – for example, they gave a former leprosy patient gloves that would send a shock to his armpit if his hands (where he had lost the ability to feel pain) experienced pressure that would be painful.
What he found was that the people would be alerted to the fact that they were doing something that could injure them, and instead of stopping the task or doing it another way, they would disconnect the pain devices and continue doing the injurious task.
His conclusion was that pain is not “turn-offable” because creatures who can feel pain are inherently self-oriented and act to preserve their bodily integrity (since otherwise the unstoppable sensation of pain will bother them continually), while creatures who could not feel pain were task-oriented, and would often do things that would injure their bodies, sometimes seriously, just so they could finish a particular task.
Unfortunately, there are situations where the inability to turn off pain is a serious drawback, like when you have a chronic pain condition or when you’re being tortured, but in an evolutionary context, those situations apparently don’t cause …
While I don’t neccassarly buy this line of thinking there might be a grain of truth to it. Why I say this is there is a procedure that I have read about (it was featured in an episode of House, which got me to do a bit of looking around) where patients are put in a Ketamine induced coma for about 10 days. The theroy is that the brain re-boots itself and the pain is gone. This treatment is not currently done in the US, but I have read about a doctor in Germany that specializes in this treatment. They claim that 85% of people who have undergone this procedure are still pain free after 5 years.
In a way I almost wish that the pain I feel everyday was in my head. If that was the case then perhaps with pshycological therapy it would be possible to resolve the issue. However, I truly don’t think that this is the case. I think that the combination of the hardware that is still in me plus the damaged muscle and tissue caused by the surgery itself is the cause of the pain. Unfortunately, besides giving me enough pain meds to kill a cow, doctors don’t have a clue.
The only option I have been given besides the meds was from a surgeon. He told me he could open me up and “have a look around”. No thanks, I won’t let someone rip me open again so he can “look around” and hopefully find something. Tell me you have a reasonable idea of what to do and I might take the chance. But, I am not going to give this guy enough money to buy a new Mercedes so he can practice cutting someone open.
V. S. Ramachandran’s work on phantom pain is very relevant here. However, I think your terminology is a little off – just because nothing is going on at the injury site doesn’t mean the pain isn’t “really” pain. Phantom pain is often excruciatingly painful and feels just like caused-by-injury pain, even though the part that “hurts” is no longer present. The “map” of the body in the brain still exists, even though the body part itself is gone, and is still capable of “feeling” pain and pleasure.
On preview: does anybody have a link to information about the ketamine-coma research obbn mentioned? I wondered about this myself after watching that episode of House…
Here is the Google search page for the search term “Ketamine Coma for Pain”. I linked you to the Google search page as there are many articles and I have not found one to be a difinitive source of information. Read a few and draw your own conclusion. Hope this helps.
A relevant Zen koan:
A monk asked Tozan, “How can we escape the cold and heat?” Tozan replied, “Why not go where there is no cold and heat?” “Is there such a place?” the monk asked. Tozan commented, "When cold, be thoroughly cold; when hot, be hot through and through.
Or, as G. Gordon Liddy said after burning his own hand with a cig lighter, “the trick is to not mind it.”
My father still has an excruciating something jammed under his fingernail. A fingernail that his brain still insists it there. He lost that finger down to the first knuckle some 10 years ago.
Plus the unusual pain sensations that the missing part provides. A warm spring day around 68 degrees F? He may have a glove on that hand as the finger in question is freezing.