Episode 41: Pain Reconceptualized: w/ Alex Jinich
Episode 41 of M3CS’s Contemplative Science Podcast saw Alex Jinich come on to the show to talk about the link between pain, meditation and the predictive mind.
For the full podcast, check out the episode here.
In this episode, we cover...
Pain and noiception: why pain is incredibly more complicated than it first appears.
How meditation acts differently to other cognitively mediated pain relief mechanisms.
The jaw-dropping potential of pain reconceptualisation therapy.
Alex Jinich is a PhD student of cognitive science at UC San Diego. Currently studying the neuroscience of the mind-body approaches to pain, his research dives into how meditation and other novel therapeutic techniques help reduce pain and improve wellbeing.
Here are some of the key insights from the conversation...
The effects of meditation are cognitively unique.
”While the placebo effect acts via the brains endogenous opioid system, meditation does not. And it's not just placebo. Every other cognitively mediated pain relief mechanism has been demonstrated to be opioidergically mediated. So the brain essentially produces our own endogenous painkillers that go down to the spinal cord and they produce pain relief in an incredibly powerful fashion.”
The brain cannot tell the difference between a prediction and a reality.
”The metaphor that I always use is if I'm holding a glass of water in my hand right now, the image that I'm getting... where the edges of the glass are very neat, are not actually the way that the information is coming in. The information itself, the "true" version of that is a lot noisier. It has a lot higher variance. Through a set of filters that are informed by all my previous instances of having held a glass and interacted with it before, that is how I am able to then clean up the image and experience it as a clean edge.”
The key to refining our predictive models is oscillation.
”I think that these contemplative practices that allow your system to oscillate between being more grounded in them and floating a little bit in a more flexible state is going to help you choose because you’re always choosing between a population of different predictions. This is happening consciously and unconsciously across every single scale of the sensory hierarchy.”
The best place to find Alex is here.
See you next week!
