The Short Version

My brain is producing the experience of pain, and it is also producing some thoughts about that experience that it thinks are interesting enough to share:

Welcome to the land of strange maladies. My day was going extremely well yesterday—as usual. I spent a couple of hours at the gym in the afternoon, walked over to Trader Joe’s and picked up a few things, and leaving the store, I called ahead to a restaurant that’s on my way home for a chef salad with chicken to go—no dressing; side of salsa. I didn’t want the frozen veggies in my pack thawing out while I waited and then ate.

With the veggies in the freezer, I sat down and dumped the salsa and some balsamic vinegar on the salad and began a delicious meal. About halfway through I noticed my lips stinging a little, and by the end of the salad they felt quite raw—hmmm, that’s pretty unusual. I put some chap stick on, which soothed them fairly well, but I continued to notice this slightly raw feeling off and on through the evening.

They still felt pretty uncomfortable this morning, and as I washed my face, I noticed the corners of my mouth—particularly on the left—were looking cracked again. This had happened in December, too, and since I was sure it wasn’t a vitamin B12 deficiency, I had chalked it up to severe chapped lips.

Since then I had mounted a 5X shaving mirror in the bathroom, and it occurred to me to look at this phenomenon more closely. I discovered tiny white spots on my inner lip; something I hadn’t been able to see last time.

Instead of checking my email with a cup of coffee in hand, as usual, I went straight to Google and found, oddly enough, that there were quite a few other people who had had exactly the same symptoms. How strange and marvelous, as Padmasambhava would say. Many had gone to General Practitioners and even Dermatologists, and only one had reported improvement: with low-dose prednisone. It goes away sooner or later for everyone, as my earlier case had, but in the meantime it can be uncomfortable in varying degrees—and it recurs.

Several times today I had a brief feeling of self-pity—one more damned inconvenience!—cut short by a somewhat painful chuckle—smiling under present conditions is not advised. As those of you who have been with me for a while know, quick adaptation to changed circumstances is an ongoing quest with me, and it seems that efforts in that direction are bearing fruit. Degeneration, pain, and loss are the inevitable lot of all sentient beings, but we humans have the ability to anticipate and prepare, unless we’re cruising along in the delusion: “It can’t happen here.”

A particular strategy for coping with that downhill slide has been evolving with me lately, and is pertinent to my present ills. It involves thinking through the experience of pain, and trying to get a clear idea of the neural processes involved.

Do the corner’s of my mouth and the rash on my lip feel pain? No more than my eyes “see” the light that shines through them. With any sensory experience, the input from the nerves—in skin, eyes, ears, etc.—is just the beginning of the process. A whole lot of processing occurs before the language areas of the brain get involved and words get attached to the cumulative efforts of millions of neurons which, themselves, have no idea what they’re responding to, or what they’re contributing to, or what any of it means. The eyes and ears don’t have an inkling of what their jobs are, nor do the neurons at the corners of my mouth that are sending those signals—they don’t hurt. Even as they’re splitting open and spilling their contents, they don’t feel a thing. Their deaths are noted and passed on to the brain, but at no point is there any awareness of what’s going on till the message is pronounced—silently or not—“Hey, that hurts!”

Somehow, my humorous reaction is made possible by realizing that while the sensation seems to come from a particular location, the experience itself—the pain—is something that only occurs in the brain, and only in a certain part of the brain. Some very primitive parts of the brain will react to injury long before consciousness of the injury occurs—we draw back from the pin-prick before it registers consciously—but sometime later, connections will be made, and the meaning of the injury will arise from coordination with all our past experiences. If those past experiences include a lot of rumination on the mechanics of our sensations, and their universality among human beings, the meaning of pain can lose its personal overtones.

I may still feel the pain, but it becomes an element in a grander scheme than my little individual existence.

Unfeeling Bee Impregnates Senseless Flower

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I had a conversation the other day with a friend who found herself trapped in a loop she couldn’t get out of. She had developed an ongoing relationship with a guy who was out of town a lot, and found herself obsessing over whether he would email that day or not, whether anything he had emailed recently suggested how he felt about her, whether something she had written to him had affected him adversely, where he was, etc., etc.

Before she got involved with him, she had had some equanimity, she said. She had been happy and contented without him, and couldn’t figure out why, with him in the picture, she was suddenly insecure and needing reassurance about her attractiveness, desirability, etc.

After she had talked for a while about what was going on, and her perplexity and anxiety about it, a parallel with my own brain operation came to mind. She had listened to some of the Bare Brains podcasts, and I asked  if she remembered Episode One in which I encountered a distressed-looking woman in the park. She laughed, remembering how my brain had snapped into hero-rescues-distressed-woman mode, and seeing the parallel with her own situation. Her brain had found itself in a situation that was familiar, comparable to many previous experiences, and activated the tools it had used in those. (Instead of “tools,” Marvin Minsky would say, “resources,” or “ways of thinking,” following his terminology in The Emotion Machine.)

Having seen that she was trapped by brain habits in this old scenario, she despaired of breaking out of it. Even prior to our conversation, she had had moments of insight about it, and yet the next email would catapult her back onto the treadmill.

Extricating oneself from these kinds of loops is a similar process no matter what sort of habit one is trying to break.

First, let me clarify who this “oneself” is—a familiar refrain if you have had much exposure to my pronouncements. We are not one unified, undifferentiated self, or person. Whenever our environment changes, neural networks are activated that have been active in previous, similar situations. (For Minsky: “ways of thinking,” or “sub-personalities,” instead of “neural networks.” I’m going to give him a thorough review some day.) When we find ourselves wanting to change our behavior, we are actually a different person—call this the “good” one—than when we are enmeshed in acting out that behavior—the “bad” one—and the good person has to figure out how to maintain control in situations where the bad one usually steps in.

I’ve talked elsewhere about tricks we can use for weight control or getting in shape, but to stick with this situation, it can be helpful to write down a description of the whole pattern, and how you’d like it to be different—I think journaling in general is a good idea for clarifying our pattens. Make a journal to note when you’ve been the good one and when you’ve been the bad one. Record yourself talking about how you’d like your behavior to change, and then put a recurring reminder in your calendar to listen to the recording, read the journal, etc. (For me, Episode Five is pertinent.) If you have an Apple computer, you can record your own alert sound, so that when you make an operating error, a voice says, “Be the good one.” Put a Stickie on your computer monitor with a similarly inspiring message. These may sound like typical self-improvement tips, but hey, whatever works. The difference with this approach is that you understand the underlying brain operation, rather than operating within the old self-illusion.

As I was about to leave, she checked her email. “Did he write?” I asked.

“Yes!”

“Did he say the right things?”

“He came close,” she said happily.

Time for a refreshing walk home in the cool night air.

Nipping Loops in the Bud

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