Jul 19, 2025 10:36 PM
(This post was last modified: Jul 19, 2025 10:42 PM by C C.)
https://undark.org/2025/07/18/book-excerpt-headache/
EXCERPTS: Why does a severe headache — from the grind of a migraine and its kaleidoscopic sensory symptoms, to the searing cluster attack that throws a person into fits of rocking and pacing — why do these feel so categorically different from any other kind of physical anguish?
[...] The pain is nowhere and everywhere, innate but foreign. It’s a mirror reflecting a mirror, an infinite echo that recedes unto itself but never leaves. When the pain gets that close to the line that divides me from everything else, or even crosses it, where is the pain anymore? Where is it in relation to me?
[...] It’s clumsy and imperfect, I know. This type of pain, the one that invades the seat of the self, evades words. “It does so, in part, because it shuts down and then vandalizes brain space, inhibits and even lays waste to the parts of consciousness that think and shape and speak,” writes Andrew Levy, a professor of English at Butler University in Indiana and the author of the 2009 book “A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary.”
“But it also does so because of pain’s social contract: pain is the surest thing in the world to the person feeling it, and the least sure thing to the person hearing about it,” he continues, “and that’s a bad deal all around.” (MORE - details)
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COMMENT: But any severe pain can rob the brain of attention that it wants to devote to something more important to it. In some respects, that may be the very core of why pain is dreaded. However, when it's confined and somatically located to a specific area of the body, that can arguably be dealt with easier than pain distributed everywhere or having an ambiguous placement. OTOH, though it is specific, a toothache sometimes seems more of an ordeal due to its very proximity to the brain or its location in the head.
EXCERPTS: Why does a severe headache — from the grind of a migraine and its kaleidoscopic sensory symptoms, to the searing cluster attack that throws a person into fits of rocking and pacing — why do these feel so categorically different from any other kind of physical anguish?
[...] The pain is nowhere and everywhere, innate but foreign. It’s a mirror reflecting a mirror, an infinite echo that recedes unto itself but never leaves. When the pain gets that close to the line that divides me from everything else, or even crosses it, where is the pain anymore? Where is it in relation to me?
[...] It’s clumsy and imperfect, I know. This type of pain, the one that invades the seat of the self, evades words. “It does so, in part, because it shuts down and then vandalizes brain space, inhibits and even lays waste to the parts of consciousness that think and shape and speak,” writes Andrew Levy, a professor of English at Butler University in Indiana and the author of the 2009 book “A Brain Wider Than the Sky: A Migraine Diary.”
“But it also does so because of pain’s social contract: pain is the surest thing in the world to the person feeling it, and the least sure thing to the person hearing about it,” he continues, “and that’s a bad deal all around.” (MORE - details)
- - - - - - - - - - - -
COMMENT: But any severe pain can rob the brain of attention that it wants to devote to something more important to it. In some respects, that may be the very core of why pain is dreaded. However, when it's confined and somatically located to a specific area of the body, that can arguably be dealt with easier than pain distributed everywhere or having an ambiguous placement. OTOH, though it is specific, a toothache sometimes seems more of an ordeal due to its very proximity to the brain or its location in the head.