Nociception and Star Trek

I had a conversation with a client recently about her chronic pain issues and used this analogy. I’m a bit of a Star Trek fan (the original more) and I asked her to imagine the Enterprise as our body and the bridge as our brain. There are a number of screens all over the bridge and there is one big one front and center that is the main focus of the bridge (brain).

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This is the bridge of the USS Enterprise, with all the small screens in the background….

For people who are dealing with chronic pain, it is like the (nociceptive) pain input to the brain is always on the front screen. All the other little screens, which represent other things our brain is processing, don’t make it to the big screen. Even the task at hand, which should be commanding our attention, flips to the big screen but quickly gets pushed to one of the smaller screens in the background. The sense of threat to the autonomics part of our brain just keeps making it the primary thing we focus on. (This is not pertaining to neuropathic pain as much but more the nociceptive input into the pain neuromatrix as perceived by the brain and providing an autonomic response—words I did not use with her:).

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We went on to discuss how trying to utilize cognitive self-regulation techniques so that she realized that her body wasn’t always being attacked by Klingons, and that hopefully she could retrain her brain to eventually make her pain become like one of those red shirt guys from the ship....