And when pain is not conveying new information, we want it to go away because pain often gets badly in the way of our goals. I find that it’s extremely difficult to think clearly whilst in even mild to moderate pain, and it’s also difficult to get motivated to think about or do anything, because it’s hard to have any goal except “remove the pain”.
Obviously, this is adaptive; a lot of the time, if you’re in pain, you need to be doing whatever is necessary to get rid of the pain, or you’ll meet the fate of the CIPA patients. But there are lots of situations where once the pain has conveyed its information, it’s no longer serving that purpose, and yet you’re still being distracted from your other goals.
I find migraines very curious as an example of pain. It’s not at all clear to me what information the pain of a migraine conveys or how this information can be used, and it is certainly a dehabilitating pain that prevents you from pursuing goals other than “get rid of the migraine”—or, as usually appears to be the only option (with a sample size of 1 here: my mother suffers from them—so this is not data!), “wait for the migraine to stop”.
And when pain is not conveying new information, we want it to go away because pain often gets badly in the way of our goals. I find that it’s extremely difficult to think clearly whilst in even mild to moderate pain, and it’s also difficult to get motivated to think about or do anything, because it’s hard to have any goal except “remove the pain”.
Obviously, this is adaptive; a lot of the time, if you’re in pain, you need to be doing whatever is necessary to get rid of the pain, or you’ll meet the fate of the CIPA patients. But there are lots of situations where once the pain has conveyed its information, it’s no longer serving that purpose, and yet you’re still being distracted from your other goals.
I find migraines very curious as an example of pain. It’s not at all clear to me what information the pain of a migraine conveys or how this information can be used, and it is certainly a dehabilitating pain that prevents you from pursuing goals other than “get rid of the migraine”—or, as usually appears to be the only option (with a sample size of 1 here: my mother suffers from them—so this is not data!), “wait for the migraine to stop”.