Mindlessness - a medical condition...

Lately i've been feeling dim-witted.

I forget and lose things almost constantly. People ask me simple questions and i cannot answer, or if i can it comes out in bad grammar. Sometimes i loose control of my motor skills; including my lips and tongue so when i talk it comes out in gibberish. I'll be listening to a conversation and when someone asks my opinion, i am unable to recall what was the topic. I can be talking and either forget simple words or even forget what i was talking about mid-sentence. I've even gotten lost in my own apartment. This began happening about a year ago and has progressively gotten worse. At some point i just started playing dumb - dumbing myself down in social situations to soften the blow to my pride. Pretty soon i had an alter ego that was taking over so that i myself forgot that i am a smart woman. Since this has gotten worse as the pain in my body has grown and become electric, i assumed there was a connection somewhere. So i started research on the effects pain has on the brain.


Pain is a warning sensation to your brain that some type of stimulus is causing or may cause damage, and you should probably do something about it.

Pain perception, or nociception (from the Latin word for "hurt"), is the process by which a painful stimulus is relayed from the site of stimulation to the central nervous system. The steps in the nociception process starts with the contact with stimulus. Next is the reception of that stimuli where a nerve ending senses the stimulus. Then a nerve sends the signal to the central nervous system; this is transmission. The relay of information usually involves several neurons within the central nervous system. The brain then receives the information for further processing and action in the step of pain center reception. Nociception uses different neural pathways than normal perception, like light touch, pressure and temperature. With non-painful stimulation, the first group of neurons to fire are normal somatic receptors. When something causes pain, nociceptors go into action first.
Three classifications of pain are:
Acute pain- caused by an injury to the body. It warns of potential damage that requires action by the brain, and it can develop slowly or quickly.
Chronic pain persists long after the trauma has healed. Chronic pain does not warn the body to respond, and it usually lasts longer than six months.
Cancer (or malignant) pain is associated with malignant tumors. Some physicians classify cancer pain with chronic pain.

People with unrelenting pain don't only suffer from the nonstop sensation of throbbing pain. They also have trouble sleeping, are often depressed, anxious and even have difficulty making simple decisions. Researchers at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, found that in a healthy brain all the regions exist in a state of equilibrium. When one region is active, the others quiet down. But in people with chronic pain, a front region of the cortex mostly associated with emotion seems to never turn off. The region is stuck on full throttle, wearing out neurons and altering their connections to each other. The areas that are affected fail to deactivate when they should. This constant firing of neurons in these regions of the brain could cause permanent damage.

When neurons fire too much they may change their connections with other neurons and or even die because they can't sustain high activity for so long. If you are a chronic pain patient, you have pain 24 hours a day, seven days a week, every minute of your life. That permanent perception of pain in your brain makes areas in your brain continuously active. This continuous dysfunction in the equilibrium of the brain can change the wiring forever and could hurt the brain. It is hypothesized that the subsequent changes in wiring may make it harder for you to make a decision or be in a good enough mood to get up in the morning. It could be that pain produces depression and the other reported abnormalities because it disturbs the balance of the brain as a whole.

After learning more of what is happening to me biologically, i am reminded of God's power in my life! By medical standards i should be depressed. I have chronic pain, little income and basically live alone. Even though i definitely have days when i cannot get out of bed, it is not because i am depressed – it is from pain and fatigue. I am comforted by the blood of Christ and the family He gave me. Although, because of distance, it is hard to be around my family more than a few times a week, they encourage me, spur me on and pray for me constantly. Clearly i am unbalanced, but hope in Christ and the support of my brothers and sisters brings me joy!

Praise be to the God and Father of our LORD Jesus Christ! (Don't check out, this is good stuff! Even if you have read this a thousand times you won't regret one thousand and one!) In His great mercy He has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into the inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade – kept in Heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God's power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief of all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. 1 Peter 1:3-7