Delving into the World of "Pain": Understanding, Experiencing, and Reacting to “Pain”

Real Solutions, Virtually

PAIN AI{D PI.EAST'RE SIMPIJFIED When you're in pain, it's hard to keep your interest in other things. You feel that nothing's more important than finding some way to stop the pain. That's why pain is so powerful: it makes it hard to think of anything else. Pain simplifies your point of view. When something gives you pleasure, then, too, it's hard to think of other things. You feel that nothing's more important than finding a way to make that pleasure last. That's why pleasure is so powerful. It also simplifies your point of view. Pain's power to distract us from our other goals is not an accident; that's how it helps us to survive. Our bodies are endowed with special nerves that detect impending iniuries, and the signals from these nerves for pain make us react in special ways. Somehow, they disrupt our concerns with long-term goals-thus forcing us to focus on immediate problems, perhips by transferring control to our lowestlevel agencies. Of course, this can do more hat* lhan good, especially when, in order to remove the source of pain, one has to make a complex plan. Unfortunately, pain interferes with making plans by undermining interest in anything that's not immediate. Too much suffering diminishes us by restricting the complexities that constitute our very selves. It must be the same for pleasure as well. We think of pleasure and pain as opposites, since pleasure makes us draw its object near while pain impels us to reject its object. We also think of them as similar, since both make rival goals seem small by turning us from other interests. They both distract. Why do we find such similarities between antagonistic things? Sometimes two seeming opposites are merely two extremes along a single scale, or one of them is nothing but the absence of the other-as in the case of sound and silence, light and darkness, interest and unconcern. But what of opposites that are genuinely different, like pain and pleasure, fear and courage, hate and love? ln order to appear opposed, two things must serve related goals-or otherwise engdge the selfsame agencies. Thus, affection and abhorrence both involve our attitudes toward relationships; and pleasure and pain both engage constraints that simplify our mental scenes. The same goes for courage and cowardice: each does best by knowing both. When on attack, you havelo press against whatever weakness you can find in your opponent's strategy. When on defense, ii's muc-h the same: you still must guess the other's plan. SOCIETY 37

Apart from pain, whose function is obviously that of informing the higher centers of the nervous system where there is something out of order, there dre mdny physiological mechanisms which are there for the sole reason of letting us know that something is wrong. We feel ill without knowing the redson. The wry fact that we haye only one term, "l feel ill," for d rdnge of conditions based on differcnt causes is extremely characteristic. -KoNnRo LonnNz

SOCIETY 949.4 ENJOYING DISCOMFORT Do not become attached to the things you like, do not maintain ayersion to the things you dislike. Sorrow, fear and bondage come from one's likes and dislikes. -B unpHe Why do children enjoy the rides in amusement parks, knowing that they will be scared, even sick? Why do explorers endure suffering and pain-knowing that their very purpose will disperse once they arrive? And what makes ordinary people work for years at jobs they hate, so that someday they will be able to-some seem to have forgotten what? There is more to motivation than immediate reward. When we succeed at anything, a lot goes on inside the mind. For example, we may be filled with feelings of accomplishment and pride, and feel impelled to show others what we've done and how. However, it is the fate of more ambitious intellects that the sweetness of success will swiftly fade as other problems come to mind. That's good because most problems do not stand alone but are only smaller parts of larger problems. Usually, after we solve a problem, our agencies return to some other, higherlevel cause for discontent, only to lose themselves again in other subproblems. Nothing would get done if we succumbed to satisfaction. But what if a situation gets completely out of our control-and offers no conceivable escape from suffering? Then all we can do is try to construct some inner plan for tolerating it. One trick is to try to change our momentary goal-as when we say, "It's getting there that's all the fun." Another way is looking forward to some benefit to future Self: "I certainly shall learn from fhis." When that doesn't work, we can still resort to even more unselfish schemes: "Perhaps others may learn from my mistake." These kinds of complications make it impossible to invent good definitions for ordinary words like "pleasure" and "happiness." No small set of terms could suffice to express the many sorts of goals and wants that, in our minds, compete in different agencies and on different scales of time. It is no wonder that those popular theories about reward and punishment have never actually led to explaining higher forms of human learning-however well they've served for training animals. For in the early stages of acquiring any really new skill, a person must adopt at least a partly antipleasure attitude: "Good, this is a chance to experience awkwardness and to discover new kinds of mistakesl" It is the same for doing mathematics, climbing freezing mountain peaks, or playing pipe organs with one's feet: some parts of the mind find it horrible, while other parts enjoy forcing those first parts to work for them. We seem to have no names for processes like these, though they must be among our most important ways to grow. None of this is to say that we can discard the concepts of pleasure and liking as we use them in everyday life. But we have to understand their roles in our psychology; they represent the end effects of complex ways to simplify. SOCIETY 9728.4

MIND OVER MATTER It seems completely natural to us that we should feel pain when we're injured or hunger when we're deprived of food. Such feelings seem to us to be inherent in those predicam.rrtr. Then why doesn't a car feel pain when its tire is punctured or feel hungry when its fuel runs low? The answer is that pain and hunger are nof inherent in being iniured or starve d,: such feelings must be "engineered." These physical circumstances do not Jirectly produce the states of mind they arouse; on the contrary, this depends upon intricate networks of agencies and nerve-bundles that took millions of years to evolve. We have no conscious senr" tf that machinery. When your skin is touched, it seems as though it were your sftin that feels-and not your brain-because you're unaware of everything that happens in between. In order for hunger to keep us fed, it must engage some agency that gives priority to foodacquiring goals. But unless such signals came before our fuel reserves were entiiely gone, they'd arrive too late to have any use. This is why feeling hungry or tired is not the same as being genuinely starved or exhausted. To serve as useful "warning signs," feelings like pain and hunger must be engineered not simply to indicate dangerous condiiions, but ti anticifate them and warn us before too much damage is done. But what about the feelings of depression and discouragement we get when stuck at boring iobs or with problems we cannot solve? Such feelings resemble those that accompany physical fatigue, but they do not signify genuine depletions because they often easily t.rporrd to changes of context, interest, and schedule. Nevertheless, the similarity would be no accident, for proUably those feelings arise because our higherlevel brain centers have evolved connections that exploit our ancient fuel-exhaustion warning systems. After all, the unproductive use of time is virtually equivalent to wasting hard-earned energy! Now what about those incidents in which some person seems to go beyond what we supposed were the normal bounds of endurance, strength, or tolerance of pain? We like to believe this demonstrates that the force of will can overrule the physical laws that govern the world. But a person's ability to persist in circumstances we hadn't thought were tolerable need not indicate anything supernatural. Since our feelings of pain, depression, exhaustion, and discouragement are themselves mere products of our minds' activities-and ones that are engineered tt warn us before we reach our ultimate limits-we need no extraordinary power of mind over matter to overcome them. It is merely a matter of finding ways to rearrange our priorities. In any case, what hurts-and even what is "felt" at all-may, in the end, be more dependent upon culture than biology. Ask anyone who runs a marathon, or ask your favorite Amazon. SOCIETY 286

SNOWWORLD

Contents of this tag: