Is pain really just a mental thing or what?

yes. pain is an interpretation of signals from the nervous system.

so your saying that even if somehow in the furture we become able to use more than 10% of our brain (i think?? ) it still wont be just a mental hallucination in our head that we image and make our barin think that it hurts?

What im saying is is it possible for us to somehow block out pain by making our brains not send the signals of pain? i

im not really good at explaining myself but i hope you get im saying

Absolutely. It’s physical, just like ragingloli said. But how you react to it is a mental thing.

@shamallama
the brain sends no pain signals. it receives input from the nerves, and interprets the signals as either pain, heat, coldness, tickling, normal touch, etc.
and there are people who can not feel pain, because their brain does not interpret it as pain.

Your brain is what tells you, “Hey, that hurts.”

There is a story about me as a one-year-old, where I placed my hand on a stove burner (the whole hand, mind; I didn’t just poke at it) and it took me a while, but when I realized it was burning me I started crying.

And then I learned that you’re supposed to pull away from hot objects if it feels hot.

But for those moments my hand was still on the stove burner I didn’t feel the pain other (older) people would have, because my brain hadn’t figured out that very hot = pain = not good = hand away, ASAP! At least, this is my theory.

I think you can definitely psych yourself out or convince yourself to not feel the pain or have it lessened…when I have bad stomachaches I go and find the most interesting, engrossing book possible. If your brain is distracted it forgets to remind you about the pain.

I saw a show about this girl with a condition where she was unable to feel pain and it’s actually pretty dangerous because her body had no non-visual way to tell her she was hurt.

I have read stories of a feeling called Phantom pain syndrome which is feeling pain from a limb that has been removed. This is apparently pretty common. I believe that means that the brain interprets signals as pain, even when the signals are from something else.

It’s similar to any touch sensation. You can plunge your hand into icewater, and feel it “burn”. The brain is the clearing house for all our senses, and even our emotions, so you could even go so far as to say our brain is us.

It is a mental thing. That’s why some people can tolerate pain better then others. The mind is a powerful thing.

Its mental. I usually deal with it by ignoring it and distracting myself, or by completely focusing on it and think about ways I could describe it to someone else in an elaborate manner (and I suck with words, so its another form of distraction).

I think its amusing how our brain interprets intense heat (like boiling water) or super cold stuff (I can’t think of anything super cold and painful) as the same kind of pain. That’s why when I wash dishes with super hot water, it feels cold at first.

pain isn’t entirely mental, nerves all around our body trigger when particular pressure, temperature, etc is applied which then directs the brain to respond to it as painful.

As a connoisseur of pain and it is very easy to write it off as mental thing if the extent of your experience is the occasional cramp or hangover.

Pain has a purpose-something is out of whack with your body. Usually we know what it is is important and what isn’t. You get leg cramps-eat more bananas. That might be mental in that we know how to alleviate pain.

However ignoring pain can kill you. At one point I was diagnosed with an ulcer. The medication helped a little and working helped me take my mind off the pain.for several years I coped as the pain went from a couple of hours enery few months to 24 hour sessions At one point it had been going for five days and I couldn’t keep anything down. That night the pain woke me up and a warm shower and a glass of water didn;t help. At that point I decided not to try and sleep and went to the emergency room. As I waited for the Dr I fell asleep. They woke me up to sign papers for emergency surgery. Evidently I had an internal rupture and if I had gone to sleep instead of the emergency room in 4 or 5 hours I would never have never awakened. All that mind over matter could have killed me. Getting over the internal infection took a couple of months.

In the mid 1980s, there was a PBS documentary series called “The Body Human” (I think) that had a whole episode on pain. Apparently, we do not experience our bodies directly; our experience them is mediated through a mental model of the body. It is through this construct that our minds interpret pain messages, and it is through this mental construct that people with amputated limbs experience the sensation of phantom limbs. The nerve endings are still there in a severed limb, but the mind interprets this information in terms of it’s old mental constructs. When the person’s image of his body is revised and corrected, the phantom limb goes away and the sensations are perceived differently.

One’s mental body image is quite robust. They can now hook up electrodes on the scalp to sample where these neurons fire in the brain and, with the aid of a computer, allow people who have lost their limbs, or the control of their limbs, to control artificial limbs with appreciable accuracy. It is also this mental body image that determines one’s threshold of pain through the mechanisms of distraction, expectation, desire, protest, etc. So, while all of this modeling takes place in the mind, the raw sensory material that is interpreted by the model does not.

I injured my elbow a couple of years ago. The pain was so intense I would have to take a couple hundred milligrams of morphine to manage it, and I would still wake up in the middle of the night howling in pain, and I would keep on howling until the meds I took kicked in up to a half hour later. One can only wonder what the neighbors thought.

Its better now, but sometimes I get so engrossed in something like Fluther that I don’t notice that my meds have worn off until I am really hurting. So, yes, there is some mitigation of pain depending on whether your attention is distracted. There is also some mitigation when the pain is considered normal and expected, as some women describe their menstrual cramps, and as I do now when my meds wear off. There is even greater mitigation when the pain is anticipated and desired, as some women report in respect to childbirth, or when you probe a sore tooth with your tongue.

On the other hand, even a slight sensation such as a sharp flick or a thwack with a finger can be perceived as highly annoying when it is persistent and unwanted. Torturers first show their victim the instruments of torture; then they tell them that no one will see how valiantly they resisted or bore up under the pain. The intent is to break down any resistance the person may have by undermining their anticipation and desire for pains that could be interpreted as a glorious martyrdom. From all accounts, it’s hard to predict who will break right away under torture and who will endure for a long time.

Whether a sensation is interpreted as pleasurable or painful is a judgement one makes based on whether the sensation is desired or not. For example, I experienced my first orgasm as painful because I wasn’t expecting it and it scared me, plus there were alarming quantities of all this “stuff.” I was sure I had broken something. A few days later curiosity got the best of me, and things turned out much more agreeably (and from then on, I was hooked). Same sensation, differently interpreted.

But, it is doubtful that I could interpret the pain in my elbow as anything but intolerable; so in this sense, the pain wasn’t “all in my mind.” On the other hand, there is a class of anesthetics, like ketamine and phencyclidine that induce a disassociative state, where you feel the pain but you don’t care because your conscious social self is so disassociated from your body self, it is as if the pain is happening to someone else. So, in this sense, pain is all in your mind.

Yes, but a clever one. It really makes you believe your toe hurts 6 feet down. A very useful projection created by your brain.

Body and mind work together. It makes no sense to say something is “just in your head” or “just a mental thing.” Your mind is distributed throughout your body. All your nerve system is part of your mind. Your skin is an important part of your mind. We store memories in our bodies.

Pain is a mental thing. But some people say that as if it means pain is not real. Pain is an interpretation of senses. You can pay attention to it or ignore it, to some degree. I figure pain is very important. It teaches us a lot. Whether or not it is phantom pain, or it is directly related to some external stimulus, I figure it’s important to pay attention to it.

However, just because you pay attention to it doesn’t mean that you have to let it ruin your life. Too much pain is not very helpful, especially if it isn’t helping you save your life. When pain is like that, it can be helpful to learn techniques that allow you not to pay so much attention to it.