Our experience of pain isn’t nearly as clear cut as, well, a clear cut; instead, our perception of pain is constructed not only from sensory information, but also from context – our circumstances, our needs and motivations, who we’re with, whether we have a sense of agency over what’s happening, and our expectations.
Pain is not the same as damage
Some things that don’t hurt are damaging
- Exposure to radiation doesn’t hurt in the moment because we can only feel what our sensory nervous system is equipped to sense
- Pain doesn’t need tissue damage to be felt – it doesn’t even need tissue
- Studies show that nearly all patients who undergo amputation report some kind of sensation from the amputated limb, and upwards of about 90% report pain
Can you reconstruct your own reality?
Pain is a complex and multi-layered experience that is often driven less by the proximate cause and more by what we think and fear, and both our conscious and non-conscious expectations of it.
- In responding to that experience, we have more tools at our disposal – creative, holistic, and not always pharmacological – than we think.
Predictive Processing
Efficient regulation of physiological processes – necessary for our on-going survival – requires learning to not only react to the environment, but to also predict the needs of the body in order to proactively prepare for and meet those needs in the (very) near future
- We do this by constructing and running our own internal model, or simulation, of our lived reality
- Typically, we’re only aware of this predictive system when our predictions are wrong – when the kerb we step off is much higher than anticipated, for example.
- A growing number of neuroscientists believe that this predictive processing is how our brain is organised to function – always just milliseconds ahead of our conscious awareness, allowing us to prepare and adapt
If we can imagine pain, can we imagine pain relief?
Placebo – experiencing pain relief or therapeutic benefit based on expectation rather than the’real’ treatment intervention – can be powerful.
- Mirror therapy has been used since the 1990s as a treatment for phantom limb pain, complex regional pain syndrome, and for rehabilitating victims of stroke suffering from paralysis.
