I am confused at the idea that you perform some mental motion and then stop being in physical pain.
Yeah, it’s definitely mind bending at first. The first time I experienced it, it was because I decided to try a technique that in theory should work but realistically speaking there’s no way it could, right?
And then at the end of the technique I was very confused about what I was experiencing, because it simultaneously felt like nothing changed and yet it didn’t bother me anymore, and I couldn’t even figure out when it had changed.
the sensation of pain is clearly unrelated to whether I want to not feel this right now, as any masochist could tell you?”
Masochism is pretty different in that pain still feels meaningful to the masochist. What I’m talking about the same sensations, but with the urgency of the sensations of your tongue sitting in your mouth. It’s there, you can notice them when you care to, but they’re utterly irrelevant so you stop noticing them the moment you have anything else to do.
I agree there is the involuntary redirecting of attention, but aside from that I still don’t consider it cognition distorting.
Direction of attention is literally the whole game. It’s what determines what we learn and what we do. Cognition distortions are built out of unmodeled pulls on our attention.
I cannot find the person right now, but this reminds me of a woman who did some mental thing about not opposing the pain with her will or something and successfully got a dental operation without anaesthesia, with the dentist observing no physiological signs of pain either. She repeated the trick some years later. She had a personal website, complained about not being an academic due to lack of funding (and lack of credentials?), called out various academics in hopes of getting them to pay her—maybe someone reading this known who?
very hot hot sauce is a reasonably safe way to explore this sort of thing. (i’ve heard that there is some chance of a persistent headache from the stuff, but haven’t looked into it much. don’t trust strangers on the internet.)
it’s a very interesting experience, ime:
if you try to get away from it / experience it less, the pain is unmanageable
if you try to experience it more, it becomes mere sensation.
Yeah, it’s definitely mind bending at first. The first time I experienced it, it was because I decided to try a technique that in theory should work but realistically speaking there’s no way it could, right?
And then at the end of the technique I was very confused about what I was experiencing, because it simultaneously felt like nothing changed and yet it didn’t bother me anymore, and I couldn’t even figure out when it had changed.
Masochism is pretty different in that pain still feels meaningful to the masochist. What I’m talking about the same sensations, but with the urgency of the sensations of your tongue sitting in your mouth. It’s there, you can notice them when you care to, but they’re utterly irrelevant so you stop noticing them the moment you have anything else to do.
Direction of attention is literally the whole game. It’s what determines what we learn and what we do. Cognition distortions are built out of unmodeled pulls on our attention.
I cannot find the person right now, but this reminds me of a woman who did some mental thing about not opposing the pain with her will or something and successfully got a dental operation without anaesthesia, with the dentist observing no physiological signs of pain either. She repeated the trick some years later. She had a personal website, complained about not being an academic due to lack of funding (and lack of credentials?), called out various academics in hopes of getting them to pay her—maybe someone reading this known who?
Celia Green (her website; her appeal to the lucid dream researchers; my synopsis of her thought, in the early 1990s).
very hot hot sauce is a reasonably safe way to explore this sort of thing. (i’ve heard that there is some chance of a persistent headache from the stuff, but haven’t looked into it much. don’t trust strangers on the internet.)
it’s a very interesting experience, ime:
if you try to get away from it / experience it less, the pain is unmanageable
if you try to experience it more, it becomes mere sensation.