Highly valuable sentences from Norman Doidge books.

''The wise use of sufficient morphine during acute pain can prevent nerves from being chronically stimulated and can save someone from developing a chronic pain syndrome.''

''Neurons that fire together wire together.''

''Moskowitz learned that not only can one strengthen circuits between brain areas by getting these areas to fire at the same time, but that one can weaken connections because neurons that fire apart wire apart.''

''Moskowitz defined chronic pain as learned pain.''

''A neuron can receive two kinds of signals: ones that excite it (excitatory signals) and ones that inhibit it (inhibitory signals). When a neuron receives enough excitatory signals, it will fire off its own signal. When it receives enough inhibitory signals, it becomes less likely to fire.''

''Merzenich amputated a monkey's third finger. After a number of months, he remapped the brain maps of the monkey's remaining fingers and found that the brain maps for the second finger and fourth finger had grown into the space he had originally mapped for the third. Because the map was no longer getting input from the third finger, and because the second and fourth fingers were doing more work now that the third was missing, they took over that map space. Her was a very clear demonstration that brain maps are dynamic, that there is competition for cortical real estate, and that brain resources are allocated according to the principle of use it or lose it."

''Moskowitz's inspiration was simple: what if he could use competitive plasticity in his favor? What if, when his pain started - instead of allowing those areas to be pirated and ''taken over'' by pain processing - he ''took them back'' for their original main activities, by forcing himself to perform those activities, no matter how intense the pain was? What if, when he was in pain, he could try to override the natural tendency to retreat, lie down, rest, stop thinking, and nurse himself? Moskowitz decided the brain needed a counter stimulation. He would force those brain areas to process anything-but-pain, to weaken his chronic pain circuits.''

Major Brain Areas Where Pain Is Processed (And What Else Is Processed In Those Areas)

1. Somatosensory 1 and 2: Pain; touch, temperature sense, pressure sense, position sense, vibration sense, sensation of movement.
2. Prefrontal Area: Pain; executive function, creativity, planning, empathy, action, emotional balance, intuition
3. Anterior Cingulate: Pain; emotional self-control, sympathetic control, conflict detection, problem solving
4. Posterior Parietal Lobe: Pain; sensor, visual, auditory perception; mirror neurons, internal location of stimuli, location of external space.
5. Amygdala: Pain; emotion, emotional memory, emotional response, pleasure, sight, smell, emotional extremes
6. Insula: Pain; quiets the amygdala, temperature, itch, empathy, emotional self-awareness, sensual touch, connects emotion with bodily sensation, mirror neurons, disgust
7. Posterior Cingulate: Pain; visuospatial cognition, autobiographical memory retrieval
8. Hippocampus: Helps to store pain memories
9. Orbital Frontal Cortex: Pain; evaluates wheter something is pleasant vs. unpleasant, empathy, understanding, emotional attunement

You can reduce chronic pain by forcing those 9 areas to process everything but pain, for example by using visualization during pain attacks (by visualizing pain maps shrinking for example).