I have lots of experience with pain. I have tended to live a bit on the edge at times, and have paid the price physically. I broke my elbow bicycle racing at the age of five. I have had some pretty decent motorcycle crashes (on the street and on the track.... well, off the track, actually), plenty of little sports injuries, and suffered my share of damage in the military. I had two back injuries by the time I was 24, and had been run over, head to toe, by a car (Oldsmobile Cutlass). I've broken and sprained enough things, and have some decent scars from my younger days. I was diagnosed with a form of rheumatoid arthritis (specifically, seronegative spondyloarthropathy) at the age of 31 that flares up every now and then and causes a variety of issues. Aside from the two back injuries, which occurred in the span of about ten months, I haven't been too disturbed for any length of time by pain.
I noticed when I was a kid that I dealt with pain different than many other kids. I noticed that some kids would practically scream in pain just knowing that it was coming. That told me that the experience of pain was not 100% physical; that there was a brain-related aspect (call it emotional, or whatever). They actually seemed to add to their own discomfort -- an odd thing to do, it seemed. I really noticed this in fifth grade, when some kid learned that he could get reactions out of people by snapping them on the hand or arm with a rubber band. When he got to me, I just kind of looked at him. Not the reaction he was expecting. Sure, there was a red line on the back of my left hand, but it wasn't like I was going to die or anything. Some of the other kids thought it was odd too. "Didn't that hurt?" "Yeah, I guess." To prove that it was no big deal, I took the rubber band and did it to myself. I became sort of a curiosity for that. It amused people to see me willingly snap myself with a rubber band (and their reaction amused me). I'm sure some of those kids, now in their mid-40s, still think that was odd. That was about the time I started to really think about pain.
Over time, experiencing, observing, and considering pain here and there, I came to believe that it wasn't necessarily the actual pain that was the cause of the majority of suffering, but the fear associated with it. Specifically, the fear that it would continue. This of course, was pain from the future.
I have also long been quite aware of the suffering of animals. Sick, injured, orphaned, abused and otherwise in-need animals have always had a way of finding me (I write this as a pregnant feral cat relaxes in a cage not eight feet behind me). It started when I was a young kid riding my bicycle along Carleton Avenue and found a baby bird on the ground. It had no eyes. I scooped it up, wrapped it up in my Mets hat (SEE NOTE 1) and took little Tweety home. She lived with us for several years. I have assisted many other animals over the years (working as a licensed wildlife rehabilitator and an SPCA cruelty investigator, as well as doing plenty of animal rescues on my own). One thing I have long wondered about is how animals experience pain.
I have seen animals in some pretty horrible circumstances, both in person and on video. There has never been any doubt in my mind that they experience pain, and that they can have some level of an emotional aspect to it. They definitely experience fear. But I have never been sure if their more limited cognitive abilities are a plus for them when it comes to pain, or a minus. On one hand, they have a limited ability to conceptualize the future. Obviously, they do have some concept of it -- it certainly appears that evolution has equipped them with some sort of predictive abilities -- but whether that applies to their experience of pain is tough to say (the fact that a previously abused animal will wince greatly when threatened seems to show an ability to predict discomfort). Another aspect of their different brains is the differing ability to rationalize and understand cause and effect. Humans have much more advanced abilities in this respect (this is how I could, even as a kid, dismiss some level of pain from the rubber band). So, while on one hand I sometimes think they may have less of an emotional pain factor, they also have less of an ability to rationalize pain away. In the end, I find myself still wondering about how animals experience pain.
When I got into religious studies and found my way into Buddhism, this topic came back to me. Buddhism, after all, was prompted, as the stories go, by the young prince Siddhartha Gautama seeking a way to relieve the suffering that was inherent in the world. Advanced practitioners of Buddhist practice are able to achieve a certain power over pain, such as the Buddhist monks that burned themselves alive as protests during the Vietnam War (which was not a legitimate war, by the way), sitting calmly as the flames claimed their lives. I came to learn that this was largely a result of their ability to live in the present moment (SEE NOTE 2).
This present moment idea meshed with my "fear/pain from the future" idea.
The last couple of years I have been including books on neuroscience in my reading. The one I am reading now is The Accidental Mind. I won't go into the details (read the book, it is a good one), but it has confirmed my observation of the importance of an emotional aspect to pain. Both Buddhism and science, then, have confirmed some of my hypothesizing about the experience of pain (Buddhism is pretty scientific in its approach to the world, actually).
With all the suffering I willingly expose myself to, and all the thought I have put into it over the years, I think I have developed some underastanding of pain, but I will continue to watch and learn more. While I don't think I'll ever see any major difference in the way we experience pain, I believe my my observations have helped me help those around me deal with it. That's worth something.
XXX
NOTE 1: Dad raised me to be a Mets fan, and to hate the formerly-of-Brooklyn Dodgers -- I sometimes feel guilty for not having anything to do with the sport these days. I started to drift away from the sport in the late 80s as I thought that Major League Baseball was getting away from the spirit of the game. This was confirmed when the 1994 World Series was canceled, for the first time ever, for business reasons. I'm glad my father wasn't alive to see that. The game survived two world wars, the Great Depression, and other major disturbances, but succumbed to greed. I don't believe I have watched a single pro game since.
NOTE 2: Thich Nhat Hanh teaches awareness of the present moment as a central part, perhaps THE central part, of his Buddhist practice. As one breathing awareness mantra goes: "Breathing in, I feel my body relax. Breathing out, I smile. Living in the present moment; This is a wonderful moment."
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