Nociception

Nociception

Any idea what that word means? I didn’t either when I first saw it in my morning reading. The Intellectual Devotional by David S. Kidder and Noah D Oppenheim.

Nociception is the perception of pain. Simple huh? It’s essential to human’s survival.
Children are born every so often that have, what is called, a congenital insensitivity to pain and anhydrosis (CIPA). These children seldom live past the age of twenty-five simply because they don’t feel pain. If they survive the stage of teething without biting off their own fingers or something worse, they still are not out of the woods. They don’t know when they’ve injured themselves or have an infection that is eating them up.

We should be thankful for the sensation of pain. Seems like an odd thing, but it is essential as you can see from this one example.

The brain has a pain matrix that sorts out the intensity, location, duration and type of pain. This matrix is called anterior cingulated cortex. The funny thing about this brain center is it doesn’t distinguish between physical pain and emotional pain. This matrix responds equally to a broken leg or a broken heart.

So then, if I follow this logic (there’s that word again) a person could die from a broken heart. I used this emotional context in my mystery suspense novel The Pink Lady Slipper. The mother of the protagonist died from extreme fear. Emotional reaction can be as deadly as actual physical harm. I researched if it was possible to die from extreme fear at this time. I found it was. Amazing!

If all that follows as true, then there is truth to the clichés “Act as if,” “Fake it until you make it,” See it, believe it, achieve it,” wouldn’t you say?

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Billie A Williams
www.billiewilliams.com
http://printedwords.blogspot.com
http://cricketshearth.blogspot.com