How To Exploit Your Brain

What is pain?

It is basically your body’s alarms system to tell you “hello you cut off your arm do something about it or you’ll die.”  Pain, is unpleasant, to create a sense of urgency or you wouldn’t do much about the blood loss for example. Some people have congenital insensitivity to pain, that is they can’t feel pain. Now that may seem like a super power you want but, tell you I shall - that it is not as good as it sounds. Alarms are irritating, but we still use them because we need them. the same way body needs the pain so that we can treat the affected area for example.

The saying, “if you put your mind to it, you can do anything”, can be taken literally.

You can literally take your pain away without drugs if you believe you can. This is NOT any motivational essay about how you can become an astronaut if you believe in yourself. What my implications are that you can get rid of physical pain if you trick you brain into thinking that nothing has happened, because if nothing has happened then there is no reason for the brain to ring alarms which in this case is pain.

 

What is simple is not necessarily easy

Tricking your brain into thinking you don’t have pain is as simple as forgetting about it, but just because it is a one step process doesn’t make it an easy process.

The White Bear Effect

Also called the ironic process theory says that if you try not think of white bear, you are inevitably going to picture a white bear in your head. It will just pop up into your head. You cannot NOT think of something, because even putting that effort means you thought about it.

Having established that, you can’t just NOT think of pain. What you can do is distract yourself by thinking of something else.

In 8^th grade I had major trypanophobia (fear of needles or injections) and also, I still watched Doraemon hehe. There was this vaccination drive in our school and I had gone for that but I was so scared that our PE teacher had to hold my face in the other direction and talk about Doraemon while I got injected, and it worked! That is because, I was thinking about Doraemon and not NOT thinking of the needle.

 

The good that even “dhongi” babas do

The reason that all these ascetics (sadhu babas) exist is because they have the power of influence. Now this influence is not necessarily a bad thing. Even a “dhongi” baba can do a lot of good for people because he creates a kind of a support system for the emotionally weak. He provides hope even though he is technically not providing it, but as long as your brain believes that you have someone, it is all that you need. People use so many brain tricking techniques for reducing pain, getting over a heartbreak etc.

 

Faith

I don’t believe in the existence of god because my brain can’t accept something which it doesn't see any logical reason for, but so many people do and I believe that it is a good thing. I’m not talking about religions, its more about having a spiritual belief that there is some entity somewhere who looks after us. For those who believe in it., it acts like a support system. They feel like they have someone even when they have no one. They have faith- not in god but that whatever situation they are in will be over and it’s just a matter of waiting.

 

Phantom sensations

Now there’s an interesting experiment which tricks you into thinking a prosthetic is your real arm. You would need a friend to this experiment.

What happens is you cover your arm under a table and keep a prosthetic arm on the table in its place. Your friend strokes both your arm (which is under the table) and the prosthetic rubber arm simultaneously and you observe the rubber arm while he does that. So, you feel what he’s doing on your arm but you see it happening on the fake arm. After a few minutes you’ll feel like the rubber arm is your real arm. To enhance this sensation, you could cause mild pain by snapping a rubber band for example.

 

Having established the power of the brain, you (or your brain) can only wonder what else the brain is capable of. The human mind has fascinated me for quite a long time and this was me sharing some of the things that I found most intriguing.