Pain

[Tycoon]

I have right here a very short entry from Wikipedia...

Pain asymbolia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pain asymbolia is a condition in which pain is perceived, but does not cause suffering. This usually results from injury to the brain. Preexisting lesions of the insula may abolish the adversive quality of painful stimuli while preserving the location and intensity aspects.

I had a dentist appointment today, and afterwards I found my teeth to be in considerable pain from all the poking and scraping that the dentist had done. It was just starting to get annoying when the thought occured to me that pain is simply a sense, a sense just as sight or smell is. With that thought I overcame the pain and while I still felt it I no longer thought it was unpleasant.

The article describes an actual condition caused by injury, but I reached, I feel, the same point through the simple understanding that pain is just a sense.

So my question to you is whether or not you feel pain is bad because of its very nature as a warning of harm to your body, or if you can overcome the nature of your mind and view feeling pain as no worse than seeing the color red or blue.

[Gods_Mercenary]

I doubt it, the pain from a tooth scraping is quite different from the kind that warns your body of imminent physical harm. While you can withstand it, eventually you have to break or otherwise your body would be misengineered in the self preservation department, to me anyways.

[thebuescherman]

I certainly believe in such things. I just had my wisdom teeth pulled last summer. The night of the surgery I was eating chicken, mashed potatoes, the works. And I never took one painkiller after the surgery. Not once did I feel any pain from the procedure. Sure, I was a little stiff, but no pain. For some people, it just happens. I think it has a lot to do with pain tolerance, and also a lot to do with the mind.

[ShadowFox]

I don't really feel tooth pain anymore. But then again, i did spend 8 1/2 hours in a dentists chair as they reconstructed all my teeth after i fell of my scooter head first on a steep slope.

[Thanatos]

Most people who have been seriously tortured learn this ability to some extent. You have some hardwired limits; at a certain level your spinal cord will do the moving away for you and it is no longer entirely a question of will.

I found this useful for the dentist's too. I react oddly to novacaine and most other things that depress nerve function; alcohol makes me walk funny after half a beer but novacaine does basically nothing. No, I have no idea why.

Readers, if you aren't planning on being tortured or going to the dentist there's a variation of the technique for motion sickness. Meditate upon the fact that you are not really sick and that the whole thing is a neurological thing caused by confusing signals from your inner ear.

[Tycoon]

I doubt it, the pain from a tooth scraping is quite different from the kind that warns your body of imminent physical harm. While you can withstand it, eventually you have to break or otherwise your body would be misengineered in the self preservation department, to me anyways.

But it is not any different. Pain only ever occurs to warn you that your body is under harm.

The body is well engineered in the self-preservation department. Overcoming the pain in the way I mentioned took a good deal of concentration, and even so I still knew that it was there, I simply no longer regarded it to be unpleasant.

[Gods_Mercenary]

Very different in intensity, I doubt if he had pulled a tooth out without novocaine you would have been capable of the same thing, and even if you were, at some point your body will react for you to truly severe pain.

[Tycoon]

Very different in intensity, I doubt if he had pulled a tooth out without novocaine you would have been capable of the same thing, and even if you were, at some point your body will react for you to truly severe pain.

As I said, it took concentration to overcome the pain. No doubt the pain from having a tooth pulled with no anesthetic would be too distracting to maintain that concentration, but eventually through practice perhaps the same could be acheived.

The purpose is not to relieve the body, as the only way to relieve the body is to stop the harm being done to it, which you may not be able to stop. The purpose is to relieve the mind.