Mind Item: Touching own injury ‘cuts pain’

There may be a good reason why people clutch a painful area of their body after receiving an injury, according to a study.

Touching the affected area allows a picture of the body to form in the brain, says a study in Current Biology.

Researchers at University College London (UCL) found that the way the body is represented in the brain is key to reducing perceptions of acute pain.

But it does not work if someone else touches the injury, they say.

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Excerpt from BBC News

Answer For An Active Mind

Last week I asked my blog followers to send me their answers to the following question and I will reply with any information that could be helpful:

“What is something you are trying to achieve in your life in which you want to know ‘why does my mind do or cannot do that?’”

I received an interesting answer (and question) from one follower (thanks for sharing):

“I’m constantly in the process of doing a lot of things at the same time. With that, I mean that I’m writing a paper, a dissertation, short stories, composing different styles of music and working out ideas for theatre. Though I think it’s great that my production is so wide, I do not particularly like the fact that it is so scattered. When I concentrate on one of these tasks, I get diverted by ideas and inspiration for all the other stuff. In the end I’m doing a bit of everything and am never really able to make big strides in one particular direction. Is that concentration deficiency or do I need to allow all of these ideas to pop up at random times without channelling them?”

Answer: While it is hard to tell from your question whether your mind has “concentration deficiency” (attention deficit), I get the impression that you may have a lot of natural mental abilities that enable you to do many things well and motivate you to seek new experiences and information. This can cause fluctuations in attention and can look like attention deficit disorder but is more the result of an active intellectual mind.

[Attention deficit disorder is a biological deficiency primarily in the brain’s fontal lobe that keeps someone from paying attention long enough on a task before moving onto the next stimulating thought or activity.]

So, what may be happening in your mind that causes unrelated thoughts to pop into your head when you are doing something? Because the neurons in our mind are assemblies that vibrate when activated (communicating with other neurons, storing/retrieving memories, etc.), the vibration in one area (while working on music) can activate another unrelated area that causes you to remember something else (your dissertation). (Parante 2010)

Memory Tool: The key is not to become distracted from what you are doing by thoughts popping into you head. If something pops into your head, write it down in a notebook and refocus on the task at hand. This gives your mind a physical tool to store an idea or thought until later without feeling like you have to deal with it at that time.

Time Box: You can also use time boxing that requires you to choose a task and predict how long you will work on it at that moment. You need to acknowledge that, if you have the urge to do something else, you will remain focused on that task for that specified time no matter what. If something else pops into your head during that task, write it down in your notebook, and return to the task until the time is up.

Use a calendar each day to schedule these time boxes in advance so you work on a variety of things important to you but commit to focusing only on them one at a time for specified time periods.

Practice these methods for your next task. Then practice them for tasks you need to accomplish throughout an entire day. Experiment and see how it goes and let me know. Remember, it is all a work in progress.

Thank you again for sharing your experience and keep us updated on your progress and your own ideas. (My answer should not be consider medical diagnosis and treatment but simply a sharing of helpful information to explore further.)