Pain; mode d’emploi

Pain and pain avoidance are some of the fundamental mechanisms shaping us as persons. Pain is a tool in learning and a motivation for acting and reacting.

Pain is often accompanied with discomfort, but not always. Pain may amplify other sensations, give redemption, turn discomfort into pleasure and prime us for reward. Pain is the meter to which we measure our pleasure.

2014, the Norweigian scientist Siri Leknes published the review-article “Benefits of pain” which is an excellent overview over the psychological mechanisms explaining the useful functions of pain. If I don’t give a reference to a statement in this blogpost, it will probably be found there. All of this research is representative for random volunteers.

Pain as an amplifier of sensations

2004 a paper was published showing that a short, painful episode (a painful laser pulse) increased the brains response to “touch” (or actually, a short electric stimulation on the skin, resembling touch). The increased sensitivity, termed “pain-induced facilitation” was shown also apply to touch on completely different places on the body. Pain can be divided into phasic pain (less than 20 s) and tonic pain (more than 20 s). While phasic pain serves to alert the senses, tonic pain will decrease sensation to touch. Pain and pleasure are generally considered as mutually exclusive phenomenon: a sensation of pain prevents subsequent sensations of pleasure, while pleasure of some sort reduces the perception of pain. (Thus people experience intense pleasure may be very tolerant to pain and even injury…)

The pain-induced facilitation has also been shown to enhance taste and the ability to differentiate between different tastes.

Relief from pain is reward

The worse the pain is, the more relief you are going to feel when pain is relieved. This is intuitive. But also, the more scared you are of pain, the worse pain you anticipate, the greater the feelings of reward are when you have avoided the pain. Thus, the greater the contrast between expectation and outcome, the greater the relief. Leknes showed this using fMRI 2011. The feeling of reward (relief) of pessimists when the pain was not delivered was due to signalling in a small spot of the brain called nucleus accumbens (NAc).

How pain will reward us

The NAc is a long known hot-spot for reward-seeking and is essential for learning from painful experience. 2008 Leknes and Irene Tracey wrote a review article “A common neurobiology for pain and pleasure” for Nature. Here the authors describe how tonic pain (longer lasting pain) will trigger dopamine release in NAc, which in turn will stimulate the brain's own reward-system; opioids. Signalling particularly through the m-opioid receptor, MOR, increases the effectiveness of rewards. So, pain will release a burst of motivating dopamine and opioids, which do not only function to decrease pain but will activate us to seek reward and when we get it, feel more satisfied by it. Sustained pain will function pleasure-enhancing.

The ability of pain-induced opioids to enhance pleasurable reward may be a mechanism for why contrasting pain with reward may actually end up with netto increase in pleasure-gain from pain, in some situations. 

The hedonic flip – or the general theory of pain relativity

Siri Leknes and co-workers have also shown that the context of pain will determine if we at all perceive it as pain or pleasure. By contrasting a mild pain (defined as a mild pain on its own) to a stark pain, this made the mild pain be perceived as a pleasure! The very same pain that was uncomfortable when the alternative was absence of pain was suddenly registered as a pleasure when the alternative was a worse pain. This beautifully shows the discrepancy between the concept of pain and discomfort. Though often intermingled, these phenomenon are not synonymous. Pain in its objective sense does not necessarily need to be uncomfortable. Rather the opposite. Leknes is very careful to point out this discrepancy in her reviewarticle form 2014.

The guilt-trip

Scientists have come to realize what the catholic church has known for ages; pain can relieve guilt. By relieving us from an unpleasant feeling, pain allows us to return to a steady-state and this relief equals pleasure. However, the pain that relieves the guilt must stand in relation to the severity of the action that caused the guilt in the first place. Not only does pain relieve guilt in the person that suffers from it; it also provides redemption to the pain-receiver in the eyes of others.

Knowing about these mechanisms provide endless possibilities to extract pleasure from pain, which was the original purpose of this blogpost. However, it turned out to be more of a celebration of the scientist Siri Graff Leknes. She is truly worth that.

Results and conclusion

This blog-post concludes the experiment

Tuesday 2/6 21:30:

Clothes for Monday. Twitter loves clothes and seems to consistently prefer skirts - more elegant than girly. Voting participation reaches an all time high. (about 60 people voted)

I feel relieved to not have to choose my clothes. By choosing clothes is also a manner of choosing which aspects of the personality to display, so it is not as trivial as one might think.

Twitter also decides to not send me out running for the fourth day in a row (8 against 4). Apparently there is a limit to how much you think I should be training. I was a bit worried there for a while.

On the 3 of June, I have an errand to a nearby city. I spontaneously decide to spend the early evening there browsing shops. There was not much point in asking twitter (I was already there). Interestingly I felt guilty. I have at this point internalized an expectation of democratic rule and done it to a duty.

Wednesday 3/6 20:20:

I ask twitter if I should go out to a bar in a nearby city and see a friend or stay at home. I have really no idea what I want. Twitter tells me to stay at home with 13 votes over 8, and I feel a huge relief over not having to decide. I also can blame twitter when I tell my disappointed friend. (Also a relief).

The side-effect of handing over a decision to some other entity is that you never have to doubt if you did the right choice. So many times is our joy of our current situation tainted with the suspicion that it could have been better if we had chosen otherwise. I have a good discussion with one of my followers about how we are ruining the here and now by second-guessing our preferences. In this experiment, regret is not possible anymore. The extent of the relief this absence of self-doubt brought me is surprisingly large.

My conclusion is that unless you can fully accept and embrace your choices, they will not be good, no matter how good your alternatives are. All kind of choices require a degree of submission, and conversely, submission is just the act of removal of doubt.

We also had an interesting question about if the choices build the individual or if choices are just a display of our personalities. For grown-ups I tend to lean towards the latter. The liberal I spoke with rather empathised that our choices continuously build who we are. From that perspective, the experiment that I am doing becomes much more controversial.

Wednesday 3/2 23:00:

A question associated to the use of a drug (a non-addictive, non-neurotoxic drug of which I am not a current user). This was by far the most problematic question during the whole week. Particularly people in law-occupations were very provoked by this question. I had to answer to if this was meant as a pure provocation. Well, the whole experiment is bound to provoke people in one way or another. Though I knew this would be an absolute no-go, I chose to ask anyway, because I was curious about participation and because I honestly considered it. There was a surprising support for the drug (9 votes, 20 votes against)

Thursday 4/2 14:00:

Twitter sends me back out actively dating with 9 votes for and 1 vote against. I remark on that it is very Swedish to combine this very permissive attitude to sex with a restrictive attitude to drugs. We also conclude that this permissiveness for promiscuity is strictly limited to situations out of a relationship and that the strong norms of the monogamous relationship over-rules all of the sexual freedom women otherwise may have.

The remainder of the experiment is not very interested. Twitter sends me out to meet someone in town wearing some skin-tight and violet dress (neither would have happened unless for Twitter), and Twitter told me to work rather than exercise excessively.

A final interesting conclusion of the experiment was how much the voting participants have revealed about themselves in the process. This has been a two way process. I have not done the analysis of individual voting-behaviour, and I will not, but the memories of who voted for what are hard to erase. What is easy to erase is the tweets from the votings this week and that is what I will be doing now.

This experiment has been incredibly productive. The experimental approach has exposed new angles on choice, democracy, power, privacy and submission I don’t think I would ever have seen otherwise.

My conclusion is that I would rather have other people chose between good alternatives than myself be responsible for making choices between bad alternatives. And I like my followers.

Preliminary results 2

Update in the voting procedure in the experiment

Sunday the 31/5 evening:

Clothes question. Business, causal or dressed up for Monday at work. The more fancy dressed alternative wins with 18 votes over the causal (14), while the business version only gets 5 votes. There is a clear gender bias in the votes – men prefer elegant, feminine clothes (dresses?). I think I need to make a gender analysis later on.

Sunday the 31/5 evening:

Exercise question: Twitter sends me out exercising again Monday morning with 9 votes against 8. (Saturday evening, Sunday morning and Monday morning)

Monday morning 1/6, 09:25 and evening around 17:00:

Weight question. It is time to step this up and give some twitter some real influence. I ask how much weight I should lose.  The turnout is worse than ever before (4, 3, 4 votes for the highest, middle and lowest option). Also, I get several protests. About weight as a measure, about the purpose of losing weight, about the possibility to lose weight. People are not happy and some refuse to answer. Instead of doing a second round straight away, I decided to wait until the evening when more people are online and redo the whole hour.

Now I carefully point out that weightloss is unproblematic for me and that the reason is purely aesthetic.  It doesn’t make people more comfortable. The vote ends with (6, 9, 6 votes for the highest, middle and lowest option). Again there seems to be a gender difference where men prefer the lower weight.

Just how controversial and difficult people think it is to tell a woman what she should weigh became obvious at the next question.

Monday evening 1/6:

Dating question. An overwhelming majority (26 votes) vote for a more free course of action as compared to a more conservative behaviour (8 votes).  It is apparently much less taboo to have public opinions of people’s sex-life than about their weight!

Monday evening 1/6:

Clothes question.  How I dress is apparently something twitter really likes to vote on. This time they went for one of the two causal options (17 votes) while the other casual got 12 votes and the dress got 14 votes.

On Monday I started to feel really self-conscious and uncomfortable. More so about the dating-question than about the weight-question, but the controversy and the low participation in the weight-matter was making me uncertain. I decided to not give any details about my private life other than those absolutely necessary for making the next vote. While this might be a narcissistic project, it certainly doesn’t have to be an exhibitionistic one.

I have also had a lot of thoughts about the power of agenda-holder in democracy. I am determining the questions and the alternative and I feel that I have the power over my life. In order for democracy to be effective, it needs to influence both the questions and the alternative given.  Unless this is taken into account, different forms of direct democracy are doomed to be toothless. 

Preliminary results

Results from the votings in the experiment:

Saturday 30/5, around 21:00 in the evening:

Dietary question.  22 persons voted initially, 12 persons voted in the 5 minutes long second round (2 alternatives got equal votes)

Result: of 3 alternatives the middle one won and I will change my diet accordingly. A moderate change.

Midnight Saturday 30/5-Sunday:

Datingquestion.  22 persons voted

Twitter voted in unison for the more radical path of action.

Saturday morning about 08:30:

Exercise question. 12 answers which again ended in a tie. 2 persons voted in the 5 minutes long second round. 2 persons sent me out running

Saturday morning around 09:00:

Clothes question. Three alternative outfits, divided into comfortable, elegant and casual. 9 votes for elegant, 5 for casual and only 3 for comfortable. Again, twitter went for the more radical option.

Saturday morning around 11:

Dating question. 19 answers, 15 for a more cautious approach, 4 for impulsive behaviour. Twitter sent me in a more responsible direction . It is to be expected that democracy has a longer perspective than short-term satisfaction.

Conclusion so far:

voting participation is sufficient for this experiment to work. The alternatives (which are all alternatives I seriously consider) seem to either divide my followers very evenly or be in complete unison over one decision. I can not predict the outcomes.

Some liberals have tried to get me to do what I want. Damn liberals, you make poor submissives! What I want is democracy! ;-)

How do I feel about this? Relieved to not have to make decisions. And it has changed my behaviour on most points of voting so far.

Thank you so much for participating!

An experiment in democracy, submission and narcissism in a private life setting during a week

There is research that shows that better decisions are taken by independent actors in a democratic manner, as compared to decisions taken by single individuals. Daniel Kahneman gives an overview of research behind this conclusion in his book “Thinking, Fast and Slow”. I am a stout believer in the democratic process and in collective decision-making. I sometimes have trouble choosing in my everyday life and I often waste time obsessing about different options.

When I was younger I read the novel The Dice Man by George Cockcroft (1971). That book kept fascinating me and I kept thinking about it through the years, though I never considered to try it. I was scared by the lack of emotional attachment in the decisions.

Today I asked twitter if I should go running or not. A friend on twitter encouraged me and off I went. During the run I thought of all the good it does us to hand over uncomfortable decisions to democracy instead of having to always assume responsibility. I thought of the debate of making it a democratic decision to split the parental leave according to parental rights to their child rather than as a family support (I guess you see where I lean in this question). Then I thought that maybe the superiority of democracy is valid also in very private situations, and I thought that my twitter account is an excellent way to investigate this.

I have spent the last years posting outrageous tweets that have scared away almost all people that don’t think like me. I have also generously blocked people that I dislike (which I have later unblocked, but who no longer follow me). I have been so dreadful that only people that are basically very sympathetic towards me have managed to stay on. It is amazing that this number amounts to over 2300 people. These people (of which I know very few irl), would not lack emotional attachment in the advice they would be giving me. These people can be the democratic support I need every I have a question where I hesitate. I just became single, so I hesitate a lot these days.

I would ask people of what to eat, how to dress, when and how much to exercise. And primarily how to interact with people in my private life.

What will this do for me? How will I evaluate this? Firstly participation; are people at all willing to participate? In what questions? Will they care about the detailed, unimportant questions, will they be disgusted by the power in the more personal decisions? So, primarily I want to investigate participation.

Second, there is the question of if my decisions get any better by outsourcing them to twitter. Each decision will have to be scored. I expect a much more cautions approach to everything as compared to what I would otherwise do, but hey, my followers might surprise me.

Third; will I be happier if I have twitter to make my decisions for me? I will be the judge of that.

Technically the experiment is designed as follows:

I remove all the people with whom I have a personal relationship with, whom I suspect would not act in an independent manner. Then I lock my account so only people that already follow me can interact with me.  I am planning to keep the experiment running until next Sunday (7 of June) but I might interrupt earlier if there is a lack of interest. The rules for the decision-making are as follows:

      1)   My followers can only chose from the alternatives I give them

      2)   You can not spread any information from my account outside my followers for the time of the        experiment since it will concern third parties who have obviously not given their consent

      3)   I chose what questions to pose

      4)   The alternative with most votes win. Votes are counted exactly 1 hour after the question was           posed

       5)   I will completely submit to your decisions with no regrets

So, if you follow me on twitter, enjoy or be disgusted, whatever you chose. For the rest of you I will try to keep the blog updated, but all questions will be deleted before I open my account for access again.