PAIN

Who has never experienced pain? And who does not live in fear of yet another bout? Yet pain does not exist as an physically encapsulated memory. Even when embedded in traumatic experience, the panic, anxiety, flashbacks, and depression are frames around an absence. At the center, resisting any effort to re-experience, is pain. It leaves a broad stain, a knowledge, a fact that has no sensation, no experiential core. Until it returns

The neurobiology of pain comprise three events: transduction, transmission, and modulation. ​ Transduction involves the conversion of noxious stimuli into electrical events in receptor neurons. ​ Transmission involves transmitting these electrical events along the neuronal pathways from the receptive source to the central nervous system. ​ There, modulation occurs at various levels in the pain pathway and involves the regulation of pain signals, including awareness. ​

But there is no memory of the sensation of pain because pain is a sensory experience that is processed and perceived in the moment by the brain. ​ The brain receives signals from the nociceptors, which are specialized nerve endings that detect and transmit pain signals to the brain. ​ These signals are processed and interpreted by the brain, leading to the perception of pain. ​ However, once the pain stimulus is removed or the injury is healed, the brain no longer receives the pain signals and therefore there is no ongoing sensation of pain. ​ Additionally, the brain does not have a specific memory system for pain sensations, unlike other sensory experiences such as sight or sound. ​ ​

In essence, pain is itself a trauma.

Beyond and besides physical pain there is metaphysical or metaphorical pain, a use of the term “pain” to mean great unhappiness, intense sorrow, severe discomfort, even agony. Pain alludes to so many kinds of difficulties in life that its meaning becomes attenuated from overuse. Pain as a noun—"he can be a pain”—is used in deracinated form.

Pain is probably the most common reason for physician and psychic consultation around the world.

But suffering is deeply embedded in the meanings and usages of the word pain. All of us knows what it means no matter the context. All of us have suffered pains in its many forms. Pain is probably the most common reason for physician and psychic consultation around the world. Whether physical or metaphorical, pain effects the course of one’s life, sometimes temporarily and sometimes chronically. And each experience of pain accumulates into a collect of attitudes, even to bending and re-shaping one’s view of self and of others.

The acute source of pain, though it leaves no physical memory, no neural memory, the experience is remembered differently. The context of a painful experience forms a frame which is remembered as significant if it has personal salience. I remember that I had excruciating pain from  knee replacement because it supplanted and ended the pain of damaged, arthritic knees, and itself forced me into physical therapy which ultimately ended that entire history of pain.

I also remember the pain of witnessing the extended demise of my parents as one became incapacitated by Parkinson’s disease and the other by Alzheimer dementia. I am sure those concomitant experiences of pain remain engraved in memory as well as grated into my character.

At the farther end of pain is joy. Does joy form the one side of a balance scale with pain on the other side? At the deep core of life, biomechanics—the physics—of living, is the law of equilibrium. Absolute equilibrium is where all action stops. We may idealize perfect balance but to remain alive requires being perpetually out of balance.

Pain will always keep that balance tipping.