explain
pain
section
2
page
40
The orchestra in the brain
The neurotag waltz
O
ne way to think about how the brainworks,
including how it produces pain, is to think about
it as an orchestra. A skilled orchestra can play
many thousands of tunes. It can play the same
tunes with different tempos, in different keys,
with different emphases, andwith different
instruments taking different roles. New tunes can
bemade up, old tunes revived, variations
improvised, depending on the audience. Pain can
be thought of as one tune that is played by the
orchestra.
A good orchestra can play all the tunes. And can
easily learnmore tunes. However, if the orchestra
plays the same tune over and over, it becomes
automatic, it plays bymemory, and it becomes
more andmore difficult to play anything else.
Curiosity and creativity becomes lost. Audiences
stay away…
And this orchestra in our heads is awe-inspiring.
It is actually a yellowish lump of neurones, the
consistency of a soft-boiled egg. It contains around
one hundred billion neurones, each of which can
make thousands of connections. There aremore
possible connections in the brain than particles in
the universe. Neurones are so keen tomake
connections that a single neurone placed in a
saltwater bathwill wriggle up to 30% of its length
in search of another neurone.
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Babiesmake
millions of synapses per second, 3million
synapses fit on a pinhead.
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You, the reader,
have a dynamic ever-changing brain; millions of
synapses link and unlink every second. You could
donate 10,000 synapses to everyman, woman and
child on the planet, and still function reasonably!
And each synapse is surrounded by an immune
cell which can influence the synapse and 100,000
surrounding synapses!
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How amazing is that! It
gives us goose bumps to even think about it. This
incredible complexitymeans that even though
pain seems to be taking over your life it is only
one part of the orchestra’s huge repertoire.
