Comment by utopia (utopia-1) on Learned pain as a leading cause of chronic pain · 2025-04-10T09:13:41.411Z · LW · GW

You touched on something meditators (buddha, lao tzu, etc) were talking about:

The brain detects a plausibly threatening sensation and generates mild pain

1. We become afraid this pain signals tissue damage (often due to prior experience or general anxiety)
2. This fear directly increases the brain's threat assessment and attention to the sensations
3. The brain produces more pain as a protective response

-->Increased pain confirms our fear, amplifying it and repeating the cycle

Unwinding this process completely all around within your entire body and mind these figures would call 'enlightment'. This concerns not just chronic pain. There is a sense in which we all have chronic pain. continuously. Furthermore, even the pain of stubbing your toe is 95% the above process (claims).

Meditation is resolving these predictive processing errors through various techniques down to the cellular level through top-down predictive rewiring (a few of which you talked about). Once you do so you will feel genuinely free from most of the pain generating processes within yourself and also be much healthier physically.