How The Brain Shapes Pain And Links Ouch With Emotion
Pain is more than an unpleasant sensation. When pain signals reach the brain, they interact with areas involved in thinking, memory and emotion.
When Sterling Witt was a teenager in Missouri, he was diagnosed with scoliosis. Before long, the curvature of his spine started causing chronic pain.
It was "this low-grade kind of menacing pain that ran through my spine and mostly my lower back and my upper right shoulder blade and then even into my neck a little bit," Witt says.
The pain was bad. But the feeling of helplessness it produced in him was even worse.
"I felt like I was being attacked by this invisible enemy," Witt says. "It was nothing that I asked for, and I didn't even know how to battle it."
So he channeled his frustration
