On Thursday 15 May 2003 6:24 am, you wrote:
> Also called "painless" contractions by doctors (who don't feel a thing).

apropos of which, and wrt the old mind/body problem:

A great item in _Derren Brown: Mind Control_ (shown on Channel 4 recently) had 
Derren Brown with four students of medicine sitting on a sofa opposite him. 
There was a table between them. Brown said that anyone who wasn't comfortable 
with doing whatever he said, who didn't want to go all the way, could leave; 
and one young woman got up and left.

The remaining three students were two women and one young man, sat in between 
the two women. Brown chose the male student, or perhaps he volunteered; I 
don't quite remember. He asked the student to put his hand on the table, and 
told him it was going numb. "This hand is now nothing more than a piece of 
dead meat sitting on the table", he said, with particular emphasis on the 
deadness of the meat. Then he started pulling on the skin on the back of the 
hand, stretching out a triangle of skin between the second and third knuckle, 
all the while saying "you can't feel that at all, can you?" and repeating the 
line about the hand being like a piece of cold, dead meat. Finally he took a 
steel pin, several inches long, and pushed it through the triangle of skin. 
The male student said he felt nothing; there was no blood. The female 
students were visibly impressed/horrified.

I take it that Brown's choice of subject for this trick was no accident: a 
young, male medical student, with an audience of two young, female medical 
students, who perhaps earlier that week might very well have been cutting up 
cadavers as part of his studies. Dead meat doesn't feel a thing. Furthermore, 
it is considerably easier to cut up dead meat if one does not oneself feel 
anything on its behalf: if the "sympathetic" response to seeing a human body 
being cut open is suppressed. The audience reaction to a screening of a film 
showing some of Orlan's plastic surgery suggests that this response can often 
be very visceral. But you can't function as a practitioner of medicine if you 
cannot help responding viscerally to other people's injury and pain. A 
medical student I knew at college said that she didn't regard this response 
as something to be overcome, through determined self-mastery: rather, it just 
sort of went away, as one got on with doing what one had to do in order to 
become qualified. No gritting of teeth required. Ambition by itself will do 
the job.

The ability to use (self-)hypnosis to block, or displace, awareness of pain is 
well-documented. It's been tried, successfully, in place of anaesthetic for 
major surgery. The dissociation sometimes experienced (or resorted to) by 
abused children is possibly a related phenomenon: the aid worker Sheila 
Cassidy, in the middle of being given electric shocks by the Chilean secret 
police, reports experiencing something akin to religious ecstasy, by which I 
don't at all mean pleasure but rather ek-stasis, standing aside from oneself 
(there's an extremely dismal, exploitatively melodramatic movie called 
_Closet Land_, starring Alan Rickman as a Nasty Bad Man, that makes heavy 
weather of the relationship between the ability to "lose oneself" 
imaginatively and the flight from pain - the victimised heroine is a writer 
of imaginative childrens' fiction). To insist on the unity of mind and body 
is, from a certain perspective, to block off an escape route: dissociation 
has its uses, and not only _in extremis_.

Dominic