few excerpts:
My Pain, My Brain
By MELANIE THERNSTROM
Published: May 14, 2006
Who hasn't wished she could watch her brain at work and make changes
to it, the way a painter steps back from a painting, studies it and
decides to make the sky a different hue? If only we could spell-check
our brain like a text, or reprogram it like a computer to eliminate
glitches like pain, depression and learning disabilities. Would we
one day become completely transparent to ourselves, and fully
conscious of consciousness consciously create ourselves as we
like?...
Over six sessions, volunteers are being asked to try to increase and
decrease their pain while watching the activation of a part of their
brain involved in pain perception and modulation. This real-time
imaging lets them assess how well they are succeeding. Dr. Sean
Mackey, the study's senior investigator and the director of the
Neuroimaging and Pain Lab at Stanford, explained that the results of
the study's first phase...showed that while looking at the brain,
subjects can learn to control its activation in a way that regulates
their pain. While this may be likened to biofeedback, traditional
biofeedback provides indirect measures of brain activity through
information about heart rate, skin temperature and other autonomic
functions, or even EEG waves. Mackey's approach allows subjects to
interact with the brain itself.
"It is the mind-body problem right there on the screen," one of
Mackey's collaborators, Christopher deCharms...told me later. "We are
doing something that people have wanted to do for thousands of years.
Descartes said, 'I think, therefore I am.' Now we're watching that
process as it unfolds."...
How does it work? I want to ask. Just as people were once puzzled by
Freud's talking cure (how does describing problems solve them?), the
Stanford study makes us wonder: How can one part of our brain control
another by looking at it? Who is the "me" controlling my brain, then?
It seems to deepen the mind-body problem, widening the old Cartesian
divide by splitting the self into subject and agent....
The area of the brain that the scanner focuses on is the rostral
anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). The rACC (a quarter-size patch in
the middle-front of the brain, the cingular cortex) plays a critical
role in the awareness of the nastiness of pain: the feeling of
dislike for it, a loathing so intense that you are immediately
compelled to try to make it stop....
...Patients who have undergone a radical surgical treatment
occasionally used for pain (as well as for mental illness) called a
cingulotomy, in which the rACC is partly destroyed, report that they
are still aware of pain but that they don't "mind" it anymore. Their
emotional response has receded....
Really worth reading the whole thing at:
http://tinyurl.com/noo5e
(That last bit reminds me of what MMY says about Jesus not suffering
on the cross. Pain isn't suffering if you don't *mind* it--if it
doesn't overshadow you?)
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