Strap on a
headset, immerse yourself in an alternate reality and cure your pain. Most
people think of pain as something that happens in the body—I twist my head too
far, and my neck sends a pain signal to the brain to indicate that the twisting
hurts. Pain is simply the brain telling us we are in danger. Although certain nerve
endings throughout the body can indeed detect bodily harm, their signals are
only one factor that the brain uses to determine if we should experience pain.
Many cases of chronic pain are thought to be the result of obsolete brain
associations between movement and pain. To explore the mind's influence over
pain, researchers at the University of South Australia, asked 24 participants
who suffer from chronic neck pain to sit in a chair while wearing
virtual-reality glasses and turn their head.
The displays
were manipulated to make the participants think that they were turning their
head more or less than they actually were. Subjects could swivel their head 6
percent more than usual if the virtual reality made them think they were
turning less, and they could rotate 7 percent less than usual when they thought
they were turning more. The findings suggest that virtual-reality therapy has
the potential to retrain the brain to understand that once painful movements
are now safe, extinguishing the association with danger. Researchers believe
that such therapy has the potential to restore full pain-free range of motion
to people recovering from injuries and could perhaps help individuals with
neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's.
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