Is Pain an Opinion?

November 10th, 2021

By Austin Frakt

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

All pain is real, but it’s also true that it’s “made by the brain” and that we can exert some control over it.

Alternative medicine — including music therapy — is full of pain-relief claims. Although some are simply too good to be true, the oddities of pain can explain why others hold up, as well as why my trumpet playing helps.

One thing we tend to believe about pain, but is wrong, is that it always stems from a single, fixable source. Another is that pain is communicated from that source to our brains by “pain nerves.” That’s so wrong it’s called “the naive view” by neuroscientists.

In truth, pain is in our brain. Or as the author and University of California, San Diego, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran put it, “Pain is an opinion.” We feel it because of how our brain interprets input transmitted to it from all our senses, not necessarily because of the inherent properties of the input itself. There are no nerves dedicated to sensing and transmitting pain.

Anyone who has willed themselves to not feel a tickle as ticklish can appreciate the difference between stimulation and our perception of it. Pain can be experienced and relieved in phantom limbs.

Discomfort and swelling increase when people believe a painful hand or knee is larger. They decrease when it seems smaller, for example in a distorted image or based on virtual reality technology. Injections are less painful when we don’t watch them. Using our brains, we can exert some control over it.

On the one hand, this is not so surprising because every perception we have is the brain’s best guess at interpreting what is happening and what we should do about it. On the other hand, the feeling of pain is overwhelmingly palpable, corporeal — when you have pain, you have it somewhere. Nobody wants to hear, let alone believe, it’s made in our head.

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