Page 70 - Advanced Biblical Counseling Student Textbook

“Many more people live with chronic (constant) pain, which is rather like an alarm that won’t shut off.
The suffering of those who cannot escape the pain of backaches, headaches and cancer-related
problems prompts two questions: what is pain? And how might we control it?” 107

Understanding pain
“Pain experiences vary widely from person to person. The pain we feel is in part a property of our
senses, of the region where we feel it. But our pain system differs from some of our other senses. We
don’t have a simple neural cord running from a sensing device on our skin to a specific area in our brain.
No one type of stimulus triggers pain (as light triggers vision). And we have no special receptors for pain.
In fact, at low intensities, the stimuli that produce pain also cause other sensations, including warmth or
coolness, smoothness or roughness.” 108

“Pain is a physical event, but it is also a product of our attention, our expectations, and our culture. The
brain-pain connection is clear in the clever rubber hand experiment, in which a participant’s own hand is
out of sight beneath a visible fake hand. Even just “stroking” the fake hand with a laser light produces,
for most people an illusory sensation of warmth or touch in their unseen real hand. Touch is not only a
bottom-up property of your senses but also a top-down product of your brain and your expectations.” 109

“With pain, as with sights and sounds, the brain sometimes gets its signals crossed. Consider people’s
experiences of phantom limb sensations. After having a limb amputated, some 7 in 10 people feel pain

107 Ibid.
108 Ibid. p. 143.
109 Ibid.

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