Understanding Chronic Pain

Memory

[From Chapter 6 of Understanding Chronic Pain]

The experience of pain cannot be separated, as we shall see time and time again, from the experiences of sleep, appetite, thought, mood, and memory. Let's explore the act of memory and its role in the generation of illness, painful and otherwise.

A life event, sufficient in meaning to command attention, invokes a change within the brain. Neurons dedicated to the acquisition of memory are recruited (the brain has enormous reserves of cells for this purpose) and they undergo a transformation. The arrangement of their neurotransmitters and receptors is altered in response to a new and previously unlearned experience. This process takes time, perhaps as long as a few minutes. As we all know, the act of rote memorization takes a while, and as we also know, a recently acquired memory is one of the most fragile things in nature, easily lost by distraction or the diversion of attention to other matters. Given sufficient time, however, the act of memorization is completed, and an experience is stored away, forever available for recall.

Kindred memories are stored by kindred cells. There is a brain-place for remembered words, another for remembered music, and almost certainly another for remembered pain. Memories are acquired along the dimension of time, and they are layered that way, one on top of the other. The most remote experiences are ensconced together, deep within the brain substance, and the more recently acquired, sequentially on top. The recall of a memory will therefore often invoke other temporally associated memories. For example, a listener hearing a remembered tune may recall the occasion of its first hearing. He may remember the theater, the companion of the evening, the dinner before the performance, and perhaps even the vintage of wine selected for the occasion. The association of memories within brain-place and brain-time can be operative, as we shall see shortly, in the generation of very complex diseases.

We usually think of memory as an experiential phenomenon. It is a product of consciousness. We experience something that commands our awareness, and we register it as memory. A memory, however, is nothing more than a rearrangement of neurotransmitters on the surface of the neuron. This rearrangement may be induced, as we shall also see, by the introduction of certain chemicals into the brain. These agents incite a change in the neurotransmitter configuration that will last forever. They create a sort of biologic memory beyond any recall to consciousness, but available nonetheless to reappear when circumstances warrant.

You can read the rest in Dr. Cochran's book, Understanding Chronic Pain

Last Updated: Nov 19, 08:13 AM

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