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Comment by chrisdone | Hacker News Reader

I read in New Scientist that they've discovered a way in mice to turn off the connection between pain receptors and the emotional response to pain in the brain. So the mouse feels the pain in the sense of recognising it, but doesn't have a negative feeling associated with it. That's like a half-way point; you wouldn't injure yourself accidentally (as the woman), but you also wouldn't suffer if enduring chronic pain.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132143-900-silencin...

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Experienced meditators are supposed to achieve this. I have read that they can have surgery without anesthetics (Gandhi supposedly did it too). They feel the pain but they do not suffer from it.

I get cluster headaches or something similar - still being diagnosed. Anyways, they're extremely painful, by far the most pain I've ever experienced. I have a meditation/visualization I do that largely negates the pain. I actually got the idea from The Dresden Files books, oddly enough - the main character does something similar at a few points throughout the series.

It works, but only if I can wholly concentrate on it.

Can you share details? I have tried to work with pain and meditation but I have always failed with headaches. They seem to consume me totally.

You don't need to meditate to achieve this. You just need nitrous oxide.

This is great for going to the dentist, but I suppose it's not so great for managing chronic pain, however.

Wouldn't it be more natural to say, you don't need nitrous oxide to achieve this, you can practice to manage chronic pain.

"Natural" is just a buzzword. People have eaten plants for medicinal purposes since pre-historic times. Why should we shy away from advances in medicine and force the patients to re-wire their brains instead?

Meditation is unnatural. The natural thing is to experience pain when something painful happens.

Meditators still experience pain. They just train to "objectively" observe pain as pain, without creating more resistance - i.e. avoiding the "second arrow" https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.th...

IMHO there is currently no way to re-program your mind like that with external means.

source please.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152659000...

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-01983-012

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439591...

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/14/5540

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/46/15307

Naively it makes sense, pain is just a sensation, but suffering is more complex. I doubt that we can truly shit off sensitivity to noxious stimuli, but meditation (and maybe some generic factors) seem like a way to manage reactions to that stimuli. Having said that, and skimming the links, I’d guess there’s a limit. A lot of what we’d naively expect to be excruciating is more upsetting and distressing than purely painful. Some things however, like inflammation of the trigemanal nerve, is really a source of intractable pain. I have my doubts that meditation would be of much use in that context, or extreme osteogenic pain.

Performing a double blind test on whether meditation can help you avoid pain would probably be unethical. Most of the claims about meditation are not verified.

You could certainly expect to avoid some pain by meditating. Maybe you picked up a coffee cup that is a little too warm, and you just "mind-over-matter" through it. Sure.

But if you got shot? Well, I can't imagine a scientist is going to feel comfortable actually testing anyone claiming they could meditate their way through that.

> Performing a double blind test on whether meditation can help you avoid pain would probably be unethical

Um... how does one even perform such a test? It's not like you don't know you're meditating.

I get migraines. Sign me up!

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