The Importance of Letting Go of So-Called Dirty Pain | WIRED: Cognitive scientists have a useful conceit for distinguishing two kinds of pain: clean and dirty. Clean pain is the kind all mammals experience—tissue damage, of course, but also the ache after the death of a mate or a child. Dirty pain is infinitely more common, and it shows up in humans. I’m an idiot for getting this sunburn. Why did my controlling cousin make me go to the beach?
With blame and indignation come new surges of cortisol that amplify—maybe even cause—physical pain. Shinzen Young, the mindfulness teacher, counsels dying patients to experience pain from annoyance to agony cleanly—with precision. It’s a challenge, but a liberating one: to resolve the pain by removing stories about who did what to you.
The reflex to find culprits—women, Jews—is a distinctly human form of insanity.
A parable about a sailor in the Zhuangzi, a Taoist text, also emphasizes the dangers of ladling dirty pain onto clean. “If he sees a man in the boat / He will shout at him to steer clear / If the shout is not heard, he will shout again.” But if “an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered� man / He will not become very angry.”
Which brings me to vocal fry, which has angered many a man, bad-tempered and otherwise. Vocal fry is a style of uttering words, characterized by a pattern of vibration in the larynx. No actual “fry” is present. A precise designation is “pulse register.” A positive one might be “vibrato.”
With blame and indignation come new surges of cortisol that amplify—maybe even cause—physical pain. Shinzen Young, the mindfulness teacher, counsels dying patients to experience pain from annoyance to agony cleanly—with precision. It’s a challenge, but a liberating one: to resolve the pain by removing stories about who did what to you.
The reflex to find culprits—women, Jews—is a distinctly human form of insanity.
A parable about a sailor in the Zhuangzi, a Taoist text, also emphasizes the dangers of ladling dirty pain onto clean. “If he sees a man in the boat / He will shout at him to steer clear / If the shout is not heard, he will shout again.” But if “an empty boat collides with his own skiff, Even though he be a bad-tempered� man / He will not become very angry.”
Which brings me to vocal fry, which has angered many a man, bad-tempered and otherwise. Vocal fry is a style of uttering words, characterized by a pattern of vibration in the larynx. No actual “fry” is present. A precise designation is “pulse register.” A positive one might be “vibrato.”