Pain perceptors

Pain doesn’t exist without an addressee who feels it, a perceptor.

The perceptor of pain is the individual in conscious state. The brain can turn on and off the individual’s consciousness. If there is no consciousness, no pain is possible.

- The pain wakes me up at night ...

The phrase is not correct. No pain is possible while one is sleeping. The same happens with general anesthesia. No patient wakes up in the middle of surgery due to pain. The anesthesiologist is the one who decides to wake up the patient, thus allowing what the brain is projecting at that moment to reach consciousness. For example, pain. The brain gives and removes the general anesthesia. Turns on and off circuits that generate a perception in the real space-time.

- I don’t think it hurts when I’m asleep.

The idea that the pain arises from tissues is deeply rooted. The tissues are there, day and night. If they hurt, for any inconvenience, it wakes us up ... but it’s not true that pain arises from tissues. It always arises from the brain. Before the brain, there can’t be pain. After the brain, anything is possible. An amputee arm can hurt, an arm that no longer exists. It's called the "phantom limb pain".

- Think it doesn’t hurt and that way it will hurt less ...

The pain perceptor can’t impose its will. As much as one wants to imagine that it hurts, it doesn’t. Imagination can’t dissolve the perceived pain either. You can’t open your eyes in front of a person and imagine that that person doesn’t exist. Neither can you imagine the person and see him, as if he were there.

- The pain receptor...

There are no pain receptors no matter how much the texts in which Medicine students are instructed keep quoting and describing them. There are perceptors, ie individuals. Pain is a private, exclusive matter of the individual in a conscious, perceptive state. There are no receptors for Chanel No. 5 or fried eggs. Only perceptors, individuals who perceive the scent from their own brains with their exclusive screens.

What is a pain perceptor?

We have no idea. Consciousness is a mysterious area, unattainable at the moment.

Consciousness is an attentional state of the brain. There, it’s projected what at that time, place and circumstances the brain selects in order to propose a specific action to the individual.

It hurts, so the brain projects a proposal of defensive behaviour on consciousness.

You are hungry, so the brain proposes to take a bite.

It itches, so the brain proposes some scratching.

It stops hurting, so the brain has ceased to assess threat.

Painkillers don’t protect the tissues. Rather the opposite: they make them vulnerable. If the pain subsides with any therapy, it’s not because what hurts went back to normal, but because the therapeutic action has made the brain modify its assessment.

The cerebral projection of pain has its moments, places and circumstances represented in memory systems. A weekend is just another moment. It doesn’t contain any ingredients of injury on the head, in spite of all the stress accumulated at work from Monday to Saturday. If the weekend is coded as "danger", "alert", on Saturday morning the pain perceptor will receive the message.

Researchers are striving to discover new drugs that block the supposed pain receptors. Strange task to block something that doesn’t exist.

We should find a way to neutralize the perceptor by diverting their attention to a particular task. Sometimes it’s effective. The ideal would be to act on the pain projector, on the brain, deactivating the plot of the expectations and beliefs that feed that cerebral proposal of protecting something from a phantom, nonexistent threat.

We have a thousand possible ways of tricking the brain, but there is only one to make it see what is really happening: explaining to it that in the absence of injury, wherever it hurts, NOTHING happens.