From: Chris Phoenix (cphoenix@CRNano.org)
Date: Fri Aug 20 2004 - 17:13:16 BST
> mel:
> Severe traumatic injury typically involves little actual pain, but
> rather an intriguing wierdness or inappropriateness, it is the
> recovery from injury that is painful. My own shoulder dislocations,
> broken bones, snapped tendons and ligaments, when I actually
> "reached into" the experience and FELT what was there were
> both odd and interesting. It was the mind's insistence on what
> my body SHOULD be that was the cause of any horror or pain.
Interesting. I've been noticing the same thing, starting from a very
different angle: connectionist artificial intelligence.
Based on some theorizing I've done about how parts of the brain share
information, I decided that the root of all unpleasant feeling
(suffering) is mental tension: when part of the brain is confronted with
something it doesn't expect. Release of tension is pleasurable. Note
that unexpected sensations from the body can cause this kind of mental
disagreement: physical tension can cause mental tension, which may be
why electric shocks are so unpleasant (and may have some interesting
implications for repetitive stress injury). Sometimes we learn to
appreciate the tension when we know it'll be released: humor and
learning on the mental side; being tickled and sex on the physical side.
Anyway, I applied this theory, and found that if something is causing me
physical pain, bringing my brain in line with what's actually coming in
from my body makes most of the feeling go away. It even works on
ice-cream headaches and sensitive spots on my teeth.
What I do is, I assume that the injury is causing more muscle tension
and other sensations than I expect, and I try to imagine what's actually
happening (what signals are actually being sent) and tell my brain to
expect them. It's a bit like learning to see one of those two-way
drawings. And it seems to work.
One way to deal with mental tension is dissociation: just make the
disagreeing parts of your brain stop talking to each other.
Dissociation is usually not healthy, though it can be adaptive. But I
don't think what I'm describing here is dissociation.
Hope this is interesting, and maybe even useful...
Chris
-- Chris Phoenix cphoenix@CRNano.org Director of Research Center for Responsible Nanotechnology http://CRNano.org MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org Mail Archives: Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at: http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
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