Welcome to the worlds of Steven Michael Harris (Author, Theorist, Educator and Performer).
I've already written what I need to explain C-fibers, the group of nerve cells that fire in synchrony when pain is experienced, but without addressing the topic directly you might not understand the implications of my theory for explaining that phenomenon.
The nervous system works like a cellular economics system that through the mathematics of each cell seeking success according to the mathematics of nerve cells in changes of sensitivity to signal and changes in connectivity these cells experience both pleasure and pain according to the nature of the firing (or rather, in vary small units of time, cycles of pleasure and pain occuring at different moments during the firing sequence). Different frequencies of firing lead to different changes in sensitivities to firing the next time a similar event occurs (with the same inputs from the same sources from other cells firing with similar synchronicity).
The cell seeking its own success (life/death, pleasure/pain, increased likelihood of firing at the optimal frequency for success) is also representing other information with these cycles between pleasure and pain so the importance of the information that is passing through that cell due to its place in the network will have a bearing on the future success of that cell. The individual cell's survival depends on the importance to the organism as a whole of the particular units of information represented by that cell (and a cell can be involved in a massive number of different pieces of information for a massive number of different subject matters).
An easy to explain example would be a nerve cell attached to a light cone in the eye that cycles between pleasure and pain that is representing different intensities of light and dark (and a part of the information needed for color). The particular pleasure and pain of that cell is not important to the organism as it is the meaning of the many light and dark units in mathematical relation to the many other parts of the visual field and the different pieces of meaning represented by many other cells dealing with different decisions in the higher processing parts of the visual cortex that is important to the organism. The organism needs that one cell attached to the light cone to keep providing its part of the information even though its portion of the importance of that information is very small, therefore the eyes saccade around quickly so that any part of the visual field that is too intense, too painful and therefore damaging to any eye cone, is passed on to other parts of the eye and other parts of the visual nervous system so that all of the cells in the eye and connected there have a chance to remain in the optimal firing frequencies as often as possible and avoid the damaging frequencies.
But pain is an event that taps into the basic nature of all cells. Pain does not need to be divided into smaller units of information among many cells taking on different decisions. Pain is half of the language of all cells and thus pain by itself has no other meaning. But pain is very important for the protection of the organism. Some cells are designed to have a great influence on many cells in the system to override other decisions and make for fast reactions (by providing vast voting blocks of cells in the nervous system that avoid internal conflicts that slow reaction times). The way these cells that represent pain have their influence is to be networked into the greatest amount of the rest of the nervous system with the greatest amount of syncronicity.
When many cells are firing in the same sequence, those cells are representing much less information of subtlety or complexity than if they were a part of another similar-sized group of cells firing in response to each other but taking on different parts of a complex task by making different non-synchronous decisions than the other cells in that group. The cells networked to represent pain to the entire organism must have massive influence to cause the entire organism to respond by avoiding the pain in that part of the body with whatever means (as the pain represents a danger to the survival of the entire organism). No meaning is necessary in pain but for the ability to calculate the direction the pain is coming from and then flinch away from it if possible. The C-fibers are a large group of cells in the nervous system that fire in synchronous unison (therefore representing the simplest of information, the basic units of cellular experience) and these C-fibers are networked to have influence in a large part of the nervous system. During painful events these cells fire in unison and engage increasing numbers of other parts of the nervous system to fire in unison until the painful influence is removed. These rhythmic pulses of pain are actually a cycling back and forth between pleasure and pain (even C-fibers are designed to operate by seeking pleasure and avoiding pain) but this causes an statistical increase of difficulty for all cells in the system to fire in their normal way responsive to the same stimuli and pain is the experience also because inhibitory influences are greater than excitatory, especially at these frequencies. (The overall experience is pain also because when the C-fibers and other cells synchronize with each other, many other cells have been indirectly interrupted from their logic of seeking pleasure over pain and are thus sorting out the interruption of the logic during both the pleasure and pain parts of the cycling in the C-fiber group. Interruption of the logic of the system causes more conflicts in the system and a greater amount of pain for the organism as what we feel as an organism is a summation of many smaller units of experience at the cellular level). Large numbers of cells joining in with the C-fibers are no longer able to represent the other kinds of information that are usually processed in those sites. Therefore intense periods of pain seem to have "no meaning." (So we call it a "blinding pain" as it removes meaning and blinds us to other issues of focus such as visual and auditory understanding.)
This phenomenon is paradoxical because from the perspective of our full-organism scale of time, the cells firing in unison (C-fibers) are actually experiencing more pleasure than pain and it is the algorithm of these cells seeking pleasure that recruits other cells to join the group that is firing, but these cells firing in unison don't communicate pleasure to the organism as a whole because this firing in unison is absent of any processing of information that is needed to keep the organism functioning well so that unhelpful firing is communicated to the rest of the network (the cells not joining in this rhythmic firing) thus increasing the stress and pain of the organism as a whole.
Pain is not defined by the stimulation of C-fibers as has been described by many in the neurology lexicon. But C-fibers have an effect on other cells (and participate on their own as well) to help create the macro (organism) experience of pain.
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Copyright © 1997-2008
steven michael harris
Lexington, virginia, usa