IUBio

Is This Pain?

kkollins at pop3.concentric.net kkollins at pop3.concentric.net
Sat Nov 28 00:08:09 EST 1998


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

>[...] 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




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