Pain and self control

As some of you know, one of my abiding research interests is the relationship between pain and self-control. Thus I bring you this:

A scientist developing a prosthetic pain detection system to help lepers who had lost sensation in their limbs avoid damage describes its failure:

In the end we had to abandon the entire scheme. Most important, we found no way around the fundamental weakness in our system: it remained under the patient's control. If the patient did not want to heed the warnings from our sensors, he could always find a way to bypass the whole system. Why must pain be unpleasant? Why must pain persist? Our system failed for the precise reason that we could not effective duplicate those two qualities of pain. They mysterious power of the human brain can force a person to STOP! --something I could never accomplish with my substitute system. And 'natural' pain will persist as long as danger threatens, whether we want it to or not, unlike my substitute system, it cannot be switched off."

Brand, P. and P. Yancey. 1993. Pain: The Gift Nobody Wants. New York: Harper Collins. Pp.195-186

Compulsions in Tourette's Syndrome

In An Anthropologist On Mars Oliver Sacks describes the compulsions of Tourette's Syndrome:

it is often difficult for Touretters, to see their Tourette's as something external to themselves, because many of the tics and urges may be felt as intentional, as an integral part of the self, the personality, the will. It is quite different, by contrast, with something like Parkinsonism or chorea: these have no quality of selfness or intentionality and are always felt as diseases, as outside the self. Compulsions and tics occupy an intermediate position, seeming sometimes to be an expression of one's personal will, sometimes a coercion of it by another, alien will. These ambiguities are often expressed in the terms people use. Thus the separateness of 'it' and 'I' is sometimes expressed by jocular personifications of the Tourette's: one Touretter I know calls his Tourette's 'Toby,' another 'Mr. T.' By contrast, a Tourettic possession of the self was vividly expressed by one young man in Utah, who wrote to me that he had a Tourettized soul.' [102]