Anomalies
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Anomalies
S-T-A is a simplistic model and in reality the three categories operate simultaneously and in close correspondence. Even keeping this in mind certain basic areas of ability do not fit into the tripartite model of STA:
'Sense' of Time & Rythmn
Our perception of Time and rythmn seem to be a synthetic function of all three STA areas. Time & Rythmn
Hormones
STA posits that there is a flow of data in through our senses via mind to muscle action. The data flow may also result in the production or circulation of hormones and other biochemicals such as endomorphins or adrenaline. These may lead to feeling states and emotions as well as other body changes.
Emotion
This is included under Mind thinks but may be quite physical and even muscular in its expression. In physiological ways related to hormones - see above.
Pain
Pain is the alarm system of the body which defends the integrity of the organism and its continued survival. Free nerve endings rather than sense receptors.
Organisms have a common reaction to the noxious or harmful in the tendency to constrict or contract away from such stimulus. The reaction to a pleasant and need fulfulling stimulus is to open up, expand, relax and generally dilate.
In this way pleasure and pain mediate survival on the most basic level. The major activity of the brain is concerned with awareness of pleasure and pain upon which the survival of individuals and species may depend. The perception and handling of pain is not yet fully understood. Nor have specific pain receptors been identified. Messages seem to originate from undifferentiated free nerve endings. There are two qualities of pain that are carried along fibers of different diameter. The larger fibers carry the knowledge of pain whilst the smaller fibers transmit the suffering quality. Painful experience seems to be the interaction between these fibers in the central nervous system.
Is Pain a sense? Or an antithesis of the senses (in that they a fundamentally pleasurable)
The destruction or mechanical dislocation of body tissue that is sufficient to constitute a damage to our organism may stimulate pain. Other knowledge of threats to our survival or integrity will trigger a psychic anxiety commonly expressed in the emotions of fear and grief. Such threats may also result in the release of hormonal chemicals by the body. But pain if often felt when there is no actual threat to out integrity - there are various ideas as to why this is. I think that such pains are very intense and full recordings of past pain that are either 'memories' or if this word is not adequate then the pain recordings are soemhow locked into the body mind erupting at times.
Draft definition: Pain is the alarm system of the body which defends the integrity of the organism and its continued survival. But pain can also become embedded in the body-mind long after the event of threat.
If the threat is great enough to put the survival of the organism on the line then anxiety or (di)stress results and can accumulate. This accumulated stress is released through emotional discharges such as laughing, shaking, raging, screaming, crying and yawing which seem to accompany healing processes. If this release is repressed it will be impressed on the body and may lead to psychosomatic illnesses, postural dysfunctions or it may reside in the nervous system causing neurotic behaviour, or resurface as a confusing memory that seems caused by current events.
Patrick Wall (died 2002) and Ronald Melzack are considered the world medical experts on pain.
http://www.accampbell.uklinux.net/bookreviews/r/wall.html
obituary by Mary Galea
http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:1uhs1FP1nroJ:www.physiotherapy.asn.au/AJP/47_4 AustJPhysiotherv47i4Wall.pdf+Patrick+Wall+pain&hl=en&start=5
- "Professor Patrick Wall changed the way we think about pain. Until the middle of the 20th Century, pain was considered primarily to be a symptom of disease or injury. Pain was classically viewed in terms of a single mechanism consisting of a modality-specific, hard-wired system of nerve fibres running between the periphery and a specific pain centre in the brain. The implication of this view was that pain could only result from clear tissue pathology, with the result that physiotherapy treatment was often directed at the peripheral source of the pain. However, this does not fit with clinical observation, in that there is little correlation between the amount of tissue damage suffered by patients and the degree of pain that they feeL"
