Just one incident can make the brain overreact to future experiences. Researchers believe the solution is to reframe and retrain.
On a misty autumn morning in Australia’s Royal National Park, just south of Sydney, a peloton of nearly two dozen cyclists tackles a 3,740-foot ascent. When they reach the highest point of the day’s 45-mile ride — the first leg of a weeklong journey — they’re rewarded with cookies and candy from support staff, followed by a downhill glide along a sandstone escarpment. Far below them, waves of the Pacific barrel toward shore and explode in clouds of foam.
The solution that they advocate, which has its share of critics, is essentially to retrain the body’s pain system, particularly the brain, to be less sensitive. According to the Pain Revolutionaries, that process begins by understanding that pain is the brain’s response to perceived threat.“If a part of your body seems to be in danger and needs protecting, then your brain will make that part of your body hurt,” says Moseley.
“Your brain can be tricked, [which can] shape perception,” says clinical pain neuroscientist Tasha Stanton, part of the Brain Bus team. The other mountain on the chart represents people with chronic pain. The top line, tissue tolerance, is a little lower, due to the initial injury, than that of a person with normal pain sensitivity. But the protect-by-pain line is much lower, leaving a large buffer zone between them. For these brains, benign sensations from ordinary activity may be misinterpreted as threatening, causing pain to kick in.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that for individuals anticipating high levels of pain, receiving a low-pain stimulus did not change their expectation for the next round: They still anticipated a lot of pain, and that anticipation was reflected in their brain activity, including the pain response.
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