Pain is allways "only in the brain".

Date:   1/13/2009 1:19:57 PM ( 15 y ago)

Just a few words about the curious nature of pain:

PAIN MECHANISM

We stub our toe, the nerve signal goes to the spinal cord and brain where that signal in interpreted as danger and is then sent to another part of the brain where there is a "map of the body" and a reaction, meant to protect us from further harm or damage, occurs - it feels like pain in the toe we stubbed. This all take places in just milliseconds, it feels as if it is all happens at once.

It feels as if our toe hurts, but that is just an illusion - the pain takes place in the brain only. Our toe, or any-other-where in our body, has no pain, the body just has the nerves to send signals to the brain and the map of the brain makes it feel as if that body part hurts.

Pain is never "real". All pain only takes place in the brain. It is a perception of pain that we feel.

That is why people with missing limbs can feel pain in those missing limbs - it is not any less real than the pain in their remaining limbs, since it all takes place in the brain.The map of the brain still contains the missing body part, and therefore there it feels painfull in the missing part.

Just because it is "not real", just because it is "a perception", does not mean we can "handle it" - pain HAS to work in order to protect us. Pain HAS to be noxious, as in very much disturbing, something to avoid. If there were ways to get around feeling pain, we would do it and then have no protection from the world around us - we would never learn to not stub our toes and the toes would succumb to tissue damage. And we could, and likely would, die early because of it. It is true that we can reduce the severity of the pain by not increasing it with emotional reactions and so on, but a basic pain HAS to be felt.

I am only writing this because it is so interesting, such as curiosity of human experience, that our toe has no ability to feel pain, and yet it "hurts" so much when we stub it!!


 

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