Your brain is your pain!

Yes, folks, the way the brain processes pain when a person strains his muscles makes him a weak or strong person to do physical work.

When a person experiences pain as most of us do but chooses to disregard it, he can do super human work.Then he has become strong not because he was born on Earth with  Superman qualities or was trained to do them but because, when he has a job to do, he doesn't care that it hurts.

Sometime back I read a story about a woman who single-handedly lifted her car that turned upside down  and trapped her husband between it and the ground to pull him out! When asked how she did it, she said later that she herself didn't understand how she got so much strength to do that feat. "All that I thought at that moment  was  to save my husband at any cost", was her reply. 

    Mind Over Matter art work by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa (from http://www.kkartfromscience.com )

An illusion is a perception that does not match the physical reality. Is pain, then, as with illusions, a mind construct that some people can decide to turn off? Pain varies as a function of mood, attentiveness and circumstances, lending support to the theory that pain is an emotion. These studies show that empathy also extends to pain, just as it does to other emotions, even when the victims are fake strangers. And the research indicates that people can experience pain for the wrong reasons or fail to experience it when it would be very reasonable to do so. Moreover, when pain is disconnected from the physical reality, it is an illusion, too.

When you hurt yourself with a stone, it feels like the pain is in your foot. But really it's in your brain.

That's because our perception of pain is shaped by brain circuits that are constantly filtering the information coming from our sensory nerves.

 So it is the brain that is actually controlling your pain. It can say, increase the volume on this pain information that's coming in or  let's decrease the volume on that and pay less attention to it. That is how you feel more or less pain or nothing at all in some situations!

For example it was found that soldiers working in the war zones helped their fellow soldiers even if they were severely hurt and said they didn't register the pain in the situation. That is how several soldiers get bravery medals. But later they were found to feel even the low intensity pain! 

Another story told by my friend conformed this. Her bus met with an accident.  One person in the bus tried to help everybody hurt in it to get out. But when somebody told him after the effort he himself lost one of his hands, looked at his stump and fainted! 

The brain also determines the emotion we attach to each painful experience. That's possible, according to experts, because the brain uses two different systems to process pain information coming from our nerve endings.

One system determines the pain's location, intensity and characteristics: stabbing, aching, burning, etc.

And then there is a completely separate system for the emotional aspect of pain — the part that makes us say, 'Ouch! This is unbearable'.

Positive emotions — like feeling calm and safe and connected to others — can minimize pain. But negative emotions tend to have the opposite effect.

Torturers have exploited that aspect for centuries. Some agents, police and interrogators of war prisoners first try to isolate, humiliate the person and then beat them up so the person can feel the pain more!

And that is why our cultures tell us to visit suffering people like our friends and relatives and comfort them and give them some mental strength so that they can endure their distress in a less painful way.

When people feel emotional pain, the same areas of the brain get activated as when people feel physical pain: the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex. In one study, these regions were activated when people experienced an experimental social rejection from peers. In another more real-life study, the same regions were activated when people who had recently broken up with romantic partners viewed pictures of the former partner.

Pain, of course, is always both a physical and an emotional experience. If someone hurts his toe, in addition to the physical pain, he is likely to be also angry or disappointed with himself or with someone else who is around and convenient to blame. 

That is why wise people say...Think of our pain and suffering as being hit by two arrows. The first arrow, the inevitable pain of life, whether a difficult event, thought or feeling, is shot at us; we have little control over this. But then we shoot a second arrow at ourselves with our own reaction to the pain, amplifying and prolonging it. The suffering from the refusal or pushing away of this pain, the "it shouldn’t be here," the "I can’t stand this," but also the blaming, the ruminating, the "why me?" the "it’s always been this way and always going to be this way" stories: these are the parts we add. To put it simply: pain is inevitable; suffering is optional. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

Scientists are  trying to understand  precisely how the brain regulates the perception of pain. 

One team studied (1) low-frequency brain waves in a part of the brain that responds to sensations in the hand. Earlier research had shown that these rhythms increase when the brain is blocking sensory information from the hand.

But what causes these rhythms to increase? The team thought it might find an answer in a frontal area of the brain that helps us ignore distractions.

So the researchers monitored the brain waves of a dozen people who were asked to pay attention only to their hand or only to their foot. During the experiment the scientists delivered a light tap to each person's finger or toe.

When participants focused on their feet, low-frequency rhythms increased in the brain area that responds to hand sensations — because participants were asking their brains to ignore sensory input from the hand, and it's these low-frequency rhythms that do the blocking of such information. That was expected.

But low-frequency rhythms also increased in a different brain area — the region that ignores distractions, the team discovered. They reported their findings in the an issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

The two areas became synchronized. There's coordination between the front part of the brain, which is the executive control region of the brain, and the sensory part of the brain, which is filtering information from the environment. That suggests that at least some people can teach their brains how to filter out things like chronic pain, perhaps through meditation.

A 2011 study supports this idea. It found that people who practiced mindfulness meditation for eight weeks greatly improved their control of the brain rhythms that block out pain.

References:

1. http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/5/2074.abstract