Pain is "the brain's opinion" that you're in danger
It can be wrong
In Katie Heindl’s wonderful Basketball Feelings newsletter today: a short but pivotal excerpt of Ballistic.
This part of chapter 10 is about an NBA player who, when landing from a jump, wouldn’t put his left heel down. This is highly unusual.
Except—we all do stuff like that.
“Pain is an amazing teacher,” says Rachel Zoffness, Ph.D., a pain psychologist, Stanford lecturer, and assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine. The human brain might be the most beautiful and intricate of all creations. But it makes mistakes. Pain, according to Zoffness, is “the brain’s opinion” about the danger you’re in.
Zoffness tells a story first published in the British Medical Journal about a construction worker who jumped off a ledge and—oops!—onto a seven-inch nail. The nail poked out the top of his left boot and popped the balloon of normalcy. At the ER, they administered intravenous fentanyl and midazolam before very carefully sawing away his boot.
Inside, though, they found a perfect left foot. No blood, no wound, no nothing. Surprise! The nail had threaded between toes. The worker’s brain had formed the opinion that the body was damaged, and sent pain signals—not because it felt the nail tearing flesh, but because it saw a nail poking through a boot top.
The brain can project real pain into pristine flesh. It can even project real pain into no flesh at all. Amputees can experience pain, called phantom limb pain, in an absent arm or leg. The homunculus is the brain’s map of the body. One way to treat phantom limb pain is mirror therapy, in which the patient looks in a mirror while completing prescribed movements. Eventually, the homunculus updates with better information about where the body ends.
Click here to read the whole excerpt.
Click here to be bombarded with blurbs about Ballistic from people like David Epstein, Louisa Thomas, and Steve Magness.