[interesting...]
kkollins at pop3.concentric.net wrote:
> John wrote:
>> > 27/11/98 21:34
> >
> > "The world and my body do exist, this is proved by the fact that they gang
> > up on me to make me suffer."
> >
> > Jean-Didier Vincent, The Biology of Emotions. (Wonderful work for lay people
> > dabbling in things neurological.)
> >
> > Rumaging around on the subject of pain, a subject always close to my
> > numerous medical abnormalities, I decided perhaps someone can help me
> > understand this.
> >
> > Nearly 20 years ago I had a root filling, nerves and pulp removed from a
> > molar. Prior to this the tooth was usually a little sore due to a poor
> > filling in the first place circa 4 years prior to the root filling.
> >
> > To this day I have recurrent pain 'in' that tooth. The pain is similiar to
> > neuralgic pain: fast and piercing then rapidly subsiding.
>> Is there anything like a metl fork involved? Or does it just happen
> "spontaneously"?
>> If the former, it might be a galvanic thing between dissimilar metals... I've
> experienced this myself. If it's intense, try using plastic utensils.
>> If it's the latter thing, it's more difficult. Whenever the innateneural
> circuitry is mucked-around-with, there's the possibility that, to a greater or
> lesser extent, the resulting "circuitry" will still signal, but in a different
> way... yielding something akin to "referred pain", but artificially
> "engineered". This's analogous to the difference between using a computer
> program as it's shipped, and opening the ".exe" in a binary editor and snipping
> out a few bits of binary data... snip the stuff in the right way and the program
> still runs... but it "says 'ouch'" every now-and-then... because the "circuitry"
> of the
computer program was "re-engineered" during the editing. [just as the text of this
msg was "re-engineered" in its prior ransmission :-) ] ken collins
>>> >[...] Is there something unique about pain that precludes it being a sense like
> hearing, smell, vision, touch, and taste? Or is that we just live in a culture
> with the vestiges of atavistic Calvinist morals?
>> We "sense" (experience) "pain", but "pain" doesn't drive the creation of
> "memory" of itself... it drives creation of memory with respect to the energy
> gradients inherent in the external environment when the "pain" is experienced,
> and which is topologically-distributed within the nervous system in a way that
> will functionally-"prefer" TD E/I-minimization with respect to "moving away
> from" similarities to such "pain"-coupled environmental energy distribution..
> ken collins