the power of the mind. Shrinking Pain Back in 2008, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford made an intriguing discovery; binoculars can be used to reduce pain. Participants with chronic pain in an arm were asked to look at their hand and perform certain movements under different conditions; no visual manipulation, looking through binoculars that didn’t do anything, looking through functional binoculars that increased the size of the hand, and looking through inverted binoculars that decreased the size of the hand. Remarkably, they found that the inverted binoculars reduced the pain felt in the hand, and even reduced swelling. They also found that magnifying the hand through normal binoculars increased the pain. They think that this is because pain responses can be influenced by the perception of danger, i.e. the worse it looks, the more your brain does to protect it.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 08:31:11 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015