Feeling Pain
In addition to the Philosopher’s Zone, ABC radio national has another great psychology-related program: All in the Mind. Recently they discussed pain.
Understanding pain requires us to think about the different way we feel things. Many things we feel on our body, like temperature and touch. Each temperature and touch sensation is associated with a physical location. We generally say things like: my feet are cold; you are touching my back; the coffee is warming my hands.
Other feelings do not have any clear physical location. When we feel an emotion it modifies our entire state of mind. We do not associate the emotion with any specific part of our body. How often has someone told you, “My foot is very angry today, but my thumb is ecstatic!”? Never. Because I am angry, not just my foot.
Emotions are also different because we cannot objectively measure them. Brainless tools will measure the heat in a nail or how hard a hammer presses on it. However, we have no tools that measure how angry a given nail is. The nail’s brain must make that judgement. For that matter, we do not have any precise machine that measures pain or pleasure on a scale from 1-10.
The brain decides what emotions to feel in part based on what physical sensations the body reports. The brain interprets them and then feels an emotion. This is what we mean when we say things like, “it feels good when you scratch there”.
Pain is special because it plays both roles. It is clearly physical. I say that my thumb specifically hurts. And you can generally see the cut, bruise or some other physical feature causing the pain. But the physical aggravation does not always cause pain. Athletes will often not experience pain until long after the cause. Probably you have cut or bruised yourself without knowing how too. Even after noticing, you may still not have experienced any pain.
Pain is not a simple sense in the same way that touch is. The body tells the mind things like something is torn and warm stuff is around it. The mind can then make the startling realization — “Oh my god! I’m bleeding!” — or just ignore it and go about its business — “whatever”.
So clearly a large aspect of pain is mental. No brain, no pain. For example, we do not waste time asking bent nails how bad the pain is and whether to call a doctor. However most considerate people stop to check up on someone they just banged with a hammer (or just skip straight to the apologizing).
In fact, some people continue to have pain long after the physical phenomenon is over. Little is known about why this happens, but All in the Mind interviewed people with such chronic pain. Pain attached itself to these people’s identity; they must now live with it every day of their lives.
The show talks about how difficult life is for these people. Since there is no longer any physical basis for the pain, standard medicine has no effect. The only recourse people have is to accept the presence of the pain but slowly teach themselves it doesn’t bother them. Amazingly this treatment can work. Although the pain never does go away, they can go off their medication and revert back to leading normal lives.