Working in Movement

Not many of us like to feel pain, whatever its cause. Skyrocketing sales of prescription and over the counter meds testify to our aversion. There have always been alternative approaches to dealing with all sorts of conditions, pain and discomfort being no exception. I'd never thought of virtual reality as a pain avoidance process, but Taking Your Mind Off the Pain describes a study that focused on just that.

Using virtual reality programs to distract from pain is not new, but how it works has been a mystery. Until now. A new study has shown the improved response to pain to be both substantial and measurable. Participants in the study got a hot foot while they were hooked up to an MRI and wearing virtual reality goggles. (Nothing like a natural setting!) That is, a noticeable, but not damaging, amount of heat was applied to the feet. In the first pass, the VR goggles showed a blank field; there was no VR program running. The brain scans showed substantial amounts of pain sensation processing. Then the researchers turned on a virtual reality program where the subjects actively participated in a virtual world. This time, the brain scans showed significantly reduced responses to the painful stimulus.

What happened to improve the response? One of the researchers admitted that it worked with distraction:

"In essence, Dr. Hoffman said, the volunteers were simply distracted. With the flood of sensory information coming in through the program, their brains were unable to direct the pain signals where they needed to go."

Distraction is one way of looking at it. Another way might be shifting the attention. That is, the VR program provided a target for the participants to shift their attention from the painful stimulus to something interesting that they could become absorbed in.

VR programs are probably pretty reliable as means to shift attention to something more absorbing. But others have been working with the issue of physical sensation and attention - and distraction isn't always the goal. One is Darlene Cohen, a master of Zen meditation, who has been dealing with the processes of rheumatoid arthritis for many years. I first became aware of her with her latest book One Who Is Not Busy, a primer on shifting attention in the workplace. But I recently learned that her writings also include books on her dealing with arthritis (Arthritis, Stop Suffering and Start Moving) as well as a more general book on dealing with pain, Finding a Joyful Life in the Heart of Pain.