Seeing Pain

June 27, 2018 3:20 PM

The Neuroscience of Pain: Brain imaging is illuminating the neural patterns behind pain’s infinite variety.
posted by homunculus (13 comments total)

Very nice, well-written article.

My first year of grad school in neurobiology, we had a class that was a general survey of the field, with a different professor from the department lecturing on their subspecialty each session. One faculty member was a pain researcher, and also happened to be Austrian. On his day to teach the class, he opened with the following, in his pronounced but erudite Austrian accent:

"Okay, let's get started. My name is Johann, and today I will teach you about pain."

None of us were quite sure whether he intended this to be funny or terrifying, but he achieved both. Anyway, it was a fascinating lecture.

(His real name wasn't actually Johann, but something similarly common in Austria.)
posted by biogeo at 4:07 PM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

The blandly uncritical tone of the piece was disturbing.

"Tracey has developed protocols to inflict the maximum amount of pain with the minimum amount of tissue damage. Using psychological tricks and carefully choreographed shifts in intensity, she has also devised ways of heightening a subject’s perception of pain. At the same time, research identifying the regions most crucial to the experience of pain has inadvertently pointed the way to the creation of artificial pain purely through targeted neurostimulation. It does not take much imagination to discern the potential for misuse of this kind of knowledge. For this reason, the International Association for the Study of Pain (I.A.S.P.) has a code of ethics, and its members are pledged not to inflict or increase pain except in an experimental setting."

unh huh. the IASP has no governance over what use their membership's findings will be put to, and it's not hard to predict what those might be.
posted by mwhybark at 4:39 PM on June 27, 2018 [6 favorites]

I can appreciate that we need to be able to feel pain. But must our nervous systems be able to produce so much of it? I think that I personally could be able to remember the message of natural selection, "Don't do that", when I stub my toe against something, with about 25% of the pain that, in fact, it produces.
posted by thelonius at 5:02 PM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

The blandly uncritical tone of the piece was disturbing.

What do you think the tone should have been?

Personally I'm not strongly concerned about the misuse of this type of research. I do think it's worth thinking and talking about, but there's already a huge wealth of knowledge in how to inflict pain without causing permanent damage, and humans are distressingly creative when it comes to inventing new methods. The techniques developed for human subject pain research are notable mostly for allowing the neuroscience of pain to be studied in a controlled, ethical manner, not for producing greater pain than other methods. I'm sure torturers will be more than happy to employ techniques inspired by the academic researchers, but I think it's also pretty clear that torturers already have plenty of techniques at their disposal, and the development of techniques for inducing pain without tissue damage in a controlled laboratory setting is not going to increase the amount of torture being done. The problem of torture is a problem of policy and of individual and community morality, and I don't believe pain research intersects that strongly with it.

By contrast, the many millions of people who suffer from chronic pain, some of whom occasionally share their experiences in this very community, will be able to experience a huge improvement in their quality of life as we learn to understand the neurobiology of chronic pain better and find ways to cure it. When conducted ethically, with external oversight and review, studying pain by experimentally inducing it without tissue damage in informed, consenting adult volunteers is absolutely critical to achieving this goal. In my mind the cost/benefits analysis of pain research is pretty clear.
posted by biogeo at 5:24 PM on June 27, 2018 [11 favorites]

the development of techniques for inducing pain without tissue damage in a controlled laboratory setting is not going to increase the amount of torture being done.

We disagree.
posted by mwhybark at 5:30 PM on June 27, 2018

Yes. If you'd like to elaborate, though, I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong.
posted by biogeo at 5:33 PM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

In reality, once you’ve “gone chronic,” as Tracey puts it, pain is the disease, rather than a symptom. That view represents a shift in understanding, brought about in part by her work. Until recently, chronic pain was thought of merely as prolonged “normal” pain. But neuroimaging has shown that, if a chronic-pain sufferer and an unafflicted person are given the same burn or pinprick, their brains manifest activity differently. Chronic pain, Tracey said, is now understood as “something new, with a life of its own, with its own biology and its own mechanisms, most of which we really don’t understand at all.”

This is just...so validating to read.
posted by schadenfrau at 5:49 PM on June 27, 2018 [17 favorites]

Some of the recent United States Supreme Court decisions in favor of the Trump Administration both affirm the illegality of the Administration's policies and the right of the Administration to conduct the policies, citing hopeful restraint as the only means of enforcement of the law. At least as I understand it.

A weapon, once developed, is employed.
posted by mwhybark at 6:09 PM on June 27, 2018

So...what? No research? Fuck everyone who suffers, because some abusive monsters will use the research to be better at being abusive monsters?

The responsibility for the abuse rests squarely on the monsters, no matter how you dress it up. Suggesting that we abandon entire areas of scientific research — and that we abandon people who suffer chronic pain — is fucked up on many levels.

You deal with abusive monsters by confronting abusive monsters.
posted by schadenfrau at 6:17 PM on June 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

I have multiple sclerosis. One of the symptoms that presents is trigeminal neuralgia, which I usually describe as an icepick being jabbed into my right lower jaw. I take meds for this, but the dosage keeps rising, and I'm sure the day will come I'll hit the limit.

I fear that.

On the other hand, I have a friend who served in Iraq as an interrogator for the Army. He tells me, and I have no reason to disbelieve him, that pain/torture doesn't have value in getting actionable intelligence. The only use for pain in an interrogation is if you're a sadist, and you want the subject to hurt. That's it.

So, yes, pain can be "weaponized." You won't accomplish much, though. (shrug)
posted by aurelian at 7:11 PM on June 27, 2018 [5 favorites]

Inflatable rectal balloons mimic the distinctive pain caused by damage to internal organs.

why do they know this, i am kinkshaming
posted by poffin boffin at 11:05 PM on June 27, 2018 [3 favorites]

Pain's Infinite Variety was my favorite This Mortal Coil album.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:53 PM on June 28, 2018 [1 favorite]

The casual attitude toward the potential for misuse was distressing, as it was coming from a person and a publication that is supposed to be letting members of society know what they need to know, to be informed citizens. Naivete?
posted by Baeria at 8:20 PM on June 30, 2018