Comment by Spearchucker | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spearchucker | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what this article is trying to say, other than a 7 Tesla MRI is godawful powerful.

Yes, we all experience pain differently. I've had more than a standard share myself (ripped arm from shoulder, in the region of ~20 dislocations followed before it got fixed). And I've never heard of chronic pain (hypersinsitivity to pain). And yes, pleasure is pain's opposite, but an even more evil beast. Because true, unadulterated pleasure is an ephemeral beast - it doesn't come often, and it never stays. Pain can stay. For a long, long time.

And that brings me to what the article doesn't discuss - how we (and how different people) deal with pain. I can take a lot - apparently more than most, because of that shoulder. Had to go under full anaesthetic every time to get it set. And until then I had to just... take the pain.

And after a few dislocations taking the pain got to be surprisingly easy. I somehow disassociated myself from it. I could feel the pain, but somehow it registered a bit like a pilot light, and a lot less that what I feel when I stub my toe or bash my shin. It was as if I was telling myself that hey there's the pain, it hurts, but it's not that agony that it is. Or was. I don't know how to describe it.

So I read that article, and I said all of this stuff, and I'm still not sure what the point of it all was, other than inform me that someone's hoping to provide a definitive measure of the severity of pain using MRI.

It is a New Yorker article - it isn't trying to make a singular point and convince you of it... it is storytelling about some interesting work being done.

As far as you not having heard of hypersensitivity, that isn't a shock. I first heard of it as a diagnosis from the Mayo clinic, after my local docs weren't able to find anything wrong with me. And they said that many doctors aren't yet familiar with it yet. It is a fairly new area of research.

But again, that circles back to the article -- it talked of how their findings support the effectiveness of cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic pain. (Also what the Mayo clinic recommended, BTW.) I found much of the article resonated well with my experiences of chronic pain, and I am hopeful that someday research such as this will be able to find reasonable treatments that dial the sensitivity back down to normal for people with abnormal pain responses.

Another term you can research if you really want to dig into this is "central sensitization".

You managed to teach yourself to dissociate nociception from suffering.

When one experiences pain, many parts of their brains light up, including the somato-sensory cortex, part of the insula (which is pain-specific) and emotion/identity-related areas in the cingular cortex. You managed to prevent the painful signals from activating the emotion/identity parts of your brain.

That is usually done through meditation/hypnosis, and it is an important part of pain management, but I don't know if it is commonly recommended in clinical settings.

I think what the author is trying to across is that despite the technological and scientific advances we still struggle with our understanding of how pain works. I mean a 7T MRI is ridiculously powerful and at the end of the article one of the scientists from the lab tells the author "That map is actually really difficult to make sense of".

They do discuss a little bit about the brain coping with pain in religious versus atheist participants about halfway down the article where in the religious population they found that a neural area was engaged that is associated with ability to override physical response.

I think this article is important right now because pain and pain management has been one of the driving forces behind the opioid epidemic that has been sweeping across the continent. Understanding pain is an important part of managing it.

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