Pain and memory

Have you ever seen the classic Sixteen Candles? Perhaps The Notebook? Have you ever been

tearful when watching one or both? Shed a tear or two despite the fact that you know there is

no planet or multiverse in which you may ever experience it? The girl sitting in her bedroom

while her lover brings a stereo player outside the balcony. I'm sure if you grew up in a desi

family like mine, you'd never expect that, or else my mother's slipper, as well as my baggage

and me, would be at the door.

I'm being dramatic. My parents aren't so strict, but the point is that all teenage romance

movies have one thing in common: they make you emotional and they're made up. That kind

of thing will never ever happen. At least not to me. I recently binge-watched all four seasons

of Stranger Things and became so invested in the characters that losing even one of them

made me cry. I'd be crying along with the supporting actors. But why is this the case? They're

only imaginary people to whom I have no connection, but I mourn their loss. Why can

television shows or adolescent movies get us so emotional that we compare our personal

experiences and anguish to the agony and misery the characters are experiencing?

Empathy and compassion are phenomena we encounter practically everyday in our

interactions with people, and they play important roles in how we react to fictional characters.

Empathy, according to social psychologists (Singer et al., 2004), permits us to rebuild what

we believe the other person is going through. Empathy may then develop to pity, or our

capacity to comprehend another person's misery, which frequently leads us to want to relieve
that pain for them. We can temporarily forget that a fictitious character lives solely in the

domain of fiction as long as a filmmaker provides us adequate perspective on that character,

allowing us to simultaneously understand their suffering and observe their experience from a

distance, as done in Stranger Things or The Notebook. When their aspirations are destroyed

or they are slain, we grieve with them, and we rejoice with them when things go their way. In

other words, we connect with them emotionally, just like we would with a pal. (Newer, 2013)

Pain, according to the book, is your body's method of warning you that something is wrong.

Pain commands you to alter your conduct, bringing your attention to a burn, a fracture, or a

sprain. Pain also has psychological benefits. It creates a contrast that enhances

our experiences. It helps us become more self-aware. It also elicits empathy from others and

fosters social bonds. (Myers, 2017, pp. 723–724) Being empaths is what makes us human.

It’s a characteristic. However, the context in which pain is experienced is important. The

severity/intensity with which you feel discomfort is also important. Understanding the term

"pain" is, in my opinion, far too convoluted. Pain, as we learned in class, is classified as a

bio-psycho-social event. We had to merge three words just to define this intricate term. So,

what makes the term "pain" unpleasant? Even thinking about the word brings up memories of

negative encounters in the past.

Childbirth is deemed to be one of the most insufferable experiences a woman can have, more

agonizing than cardiac arrest and colonoscopy combined. In a study (Babel et al., 2015) and

(Niven & Murphy Black, 2000), some women were asked to recount and explain their labor

experiences two months following their delivery, and they described it as excruciating and

unbearable. When asked almost a year later by the same test participants, the majority of

them remembered it not being as unpleasant as previously. So, do we eventually forget

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tremendous degrees of pain? Memory is the encoding, storage, and retrieval of information,

and research (Paul, 2012) reveals that each time we recollect memories, we rebuild them

slightly differently. Our memories are not like a DVD collection that we can go through and

repeat any prior event precisely as it happened — instead, the context of the original memory

and how we relate the narrative each time matters. The pain of childbirth has a purpose — if

the baby is delivered successfully, this happy outcome should, in principle, decrease the

recollection of the agony. But, plainly, for some moms, even the joy of a new baby cannot

erase the agony of childbirth, such as my mum, who every time recalls how painful it was for

her to have me because she had diabetes already and had a normal delivery, although her

timeline of events describing it aren’t always the same.

Remembering pain isn't a terrible thing. Teenage romance movie characters, on the other

hand, would disagree. Back in sixth grade, I learned about the basic reflex arc of the nervous

system, which stated that touching something extremely hot or extremely cold would send

signals to the brain via a chain of sensory and relay neurons and send signals back to the

receptors via motor neurons to move away from that object. Then, if we encounter a hot or

cold object, our brain will remember this event and ensure that we do not make the same

mistake again, or else our hand will be burned. Having had a fracture in the past, I avoid

puddles on the ground —the memory can keep us safe and prevent an accident from

happening again. In class we learned about nociceptors and how they prevent dangerous or

potentially dangerous sorts of pain and how our nerves can amplify small amounts of pain.

That’s why hearing about someone’s accident, such as a nail piercing through their foot, or

even small pain accidently inflicted on oneself such as a paper cut, seems to be more painful

than it actually is. As said earlier and this just proves why we need three words to define pain,

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or the experience of it. A person’s emotional state at that moment, their memory and their

beliefs and expectations on pain can influence how much pain they experience.

Returning to adolescent romance, or romance in general, heartbreak is inevitable and awful.

It's emotional, yet we may occasionally physically feel the pain of grief. This is similar to the

phantom limb experiences after a limb amputation we discussed in class. In a research study

(Fisher et al., 2010) that looked at the brains of heartbroken people, participants sobbed,

trembled, and became furious when they looked at photographs or discussed the person who

had rejected them. It was obvious from fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans

that the subjects' emotions produced activity in the same brain regions connected with

physical pain. I've often questioned how emotional anguish can make you physically unwell,

sometimes to the point that you feel compelled to take hazardous means to stop it. This is a

broad question with numerous factors to consider and take into context, but what I best

understand is that because pain is such a biopsychosocial event, our emotions and thoughts

are the result of us processing information in the brain, primarily the amygdala, cerebral

cortex, hippocampus, and thalamus working together. Because the hippocampus is so closely

tied with memory, it stands to reason that recalling particular memories is related with

sadness. When our brain transmits and receives neurotransmitters, the absorption of the

neurotransmitter serotonin decreases, making us feel more 'on the edge' and 'sad' than before.

It is not clinical depression, but it may indicate an issue with neurotransmitter absorption.

(Department Of Health And Human Services, U.S., 2016, Chapter 3)

Word count:1257

Written by Mehar Khoja

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