Visualising pain

Headache

Finding forms with which to visualise pain is not as easy as you might think. For one person a jagged yellow may feel exactly right as a visual translation of their headache but for someone else it doesn't work at all. Perhaps there is no universal correlation between a pain and a visual form and if not why am I working in this area? I think it's because there is some correlation, some instinctual connection between a pain and a shape, but not one that can be pinned down into a grid of references that allows us to see a throbbing pain as one form and a sharp pain as another. Perhaps it is also because the more I work with people I realise that it is not the images that I produce with them being accurate representations of pain or other somatic feelings that are the most important thing, it is rather the process of forward and backward iterations of change and adjustment in response to conversations, and the record of this that is important. During this process people become more aware of their feelings and as they do, something happens in their mental life that allows in change, something new begins to work its way into neural pathways and possibilities begin to open out. The forms discovered therefore represent 'possibilities' and are open to interpretation, rather than them being dictionary like fixed readings. The images are more about visualising the human condition of being always unsure as to how other humans receive our complex communications. We feel certain things about life and our consciousness of it but we might also feel that only our own mind is certain to exist and that we are locked inside our own subjective experiences. In philosophy this is called solipsism and is to do with the problem of other minds, the emotional realisation of this being sometimes seen as a form of existentialism. However, I'm a believer in intersubjectivity, not just amongst people but in a pan-creation intersubjectivity and believe that consciousness and meaning do not originate inside my own individual brain, but are collectively co-created across the entire relational and environmental fabric of existence. Therefore altruism is of vital importance to me, not just in terms of the value I put on the existence and welfare of others but on my awareness and value of our interconnectedness with everything else. In having conversations and responding to them through drawing, the images that evolve are for myself, a materialised realisation of these ideas.

In an earlier post on decor art, I was ruminating on the fact that surveys had found that people did not like certain shapes and colours in paintings and that perhaps spiky shapes, sharp, jagged and angular forms reminded us of aggression and pain, because they resemble thorns, teeth, or claws and these forms therefore possibly trigger primitive survival instincts and raise alertness. I also stated that harsh, bright colours, high-contrast hues and highly saturated colours demand immediate attention, as psychologically they represent warning signs, urgency, and intensity. However there would be a very different response to these forms when experienced as part of a fireworks display. How we would then emotionally react to those fireworks, would though depend on our current mental state. When we were hosting a Ukrainian couple, a boy and his mother, who had come over to England to escape the war, we had not thought about this. When a firework display began in our local Sikh temple, the boy hid under a table, the loud bangs signifying for him immediate danger. Someone suffering from PTSD may well find the experience of fireworks frightening and disorientating but most people who have been introduced to fireworks within calm, family orientated situations, are able to get an uplifting mental excitement from the experience.

For myself, watching fireworks triggers a feeling of awe, which creates a space for me to enter the sublime, a state that blends wonder with a thrilling touch of terror. Unlike traditional beauty, the sublime challenges and humbles us. In the case of fireworks, the emotional state that arises, combines visual stimulation from bright, dynamic colours with the sudden, thrilling crack of loud bangs; leading to a temporary state of euphoria and excitement. From their stunning colours to their thunderous booms, fireworks trigger reactions that are emotional and instinctive.

A certain class of fireworks that I come across, especially during large scale organised firework displays, tends to evoke a more complex series of emotions, I'm thinking here of the firework effects such as airborne chrysanthemums or peonies, forms that jellyfish like grow and fluctuate, often exploding with bangs and crackle effects, some of which begin and others end their sequence of unfolding. These forms heighten excitement by activating neural pathways associated with curiosity as well as awe. These fireworks I believe tap into an evolutionary preference for eye-catching stimuli, similar to how flowers or ripe fruit grab our attention. Watching these types of fireworks doesn’t just captivate us, it feels good. The brain releases dopamine, these vivid visuals paired with loud sounds, also helping forget everyday worries, creating a temporary state of euphoria. The intersubjectivity that I mentioned earlier is in my mind confirmed by then looking around the crowd that has gathered to watch the fireworks. I see that sense of awe in many faces and know that others are feeling something similar to myself. But not everyone has the same expression, some are excited, others calm and contemplative; some are quickly distracted, whilst others remain entranced. I wonder if this is to do with the five personality traits. Often condensed into the acronym OCEAN, these are 'Openness to Experience', a measure of creativity, curiosity, and interest in new ideas; 'Conscientiousness', a measure of self-discipline and focus on goals; 'Extraversion', a measure of how sociable you are; 'Agreeableness', a measure of kindness, warmth and your cooperative nature and 'Neuroticism', the measure of your emotional stability and how easily you experience negative feelings like stress or anxiety.

I'm rambling on, but in effect as I ramble, I'm trying to think about why similar things may evoke different feelings in different people and yet at the same time a certain amount of similar or collectively understood information is also communicated. My curiosity allows me, or predisposes me, to see associations between flowers and fireworks and also at the same time because of my research into interception, I can see a connection with the shapes of firework explosions and the sorts of forms that people have used to visualise how they experience a pain.

As soon as you begin to ask someone about a pain, you begin to realise it will be a complicated answer. For instance it may feel as if it is constantly in flux, it may be flickering in and out of consciousness or pulsing, throbbing, beating, pounding, jumping, flashing, shooting, boring, drilling, stabbing, sharp, cutting, lacerating, pinching, pressing, gnawing, cramping or crushing. It may feel as if it is tugging, pulling, hot, burning, scalding, searing, tingling, itchy, smarting, stinging, dull, sore, hurting, aching, heavy, tender, taut, rasping, splitting, tiring, exhausting, sickening, or suffocating, some of these feelings coming with more emotional associations than others. Certain feelings are very closely associated with pain, someone may be fearful, frightened, terrified, or feel the pain is punishing, gruelling, cruel, vicious, blinding, annoying, troublesome, miserable, intense, unbearable, spreading, radiating, penetrating or piercing. It may also be felt as a numb pain or as if you are being squeezed or torn. Cool, cold and freezing feelings can be experienced, alongside nagging, nauseating, agonising, dreadful and torturing pain. These feelings of pain might be brief, rhythmic, continuous, momentary, periodic, steady, transient, intermittent or constant and you may feel sad about them or angry or bored or worried or just accept them. It is in the unpicking of this complexity that the individuality of interoceptual feelings are unearthed.
Basic experiences such as throbbing, burning, stabbing, shooting, aching and itchy pains have been initially in drawing led conversations visualised by dots, lines, textures, colours, etc. in both two and three dimensions. I am also aware that others have been there before me such as Tong et al 2014 and that the forms they came up with were not dissimilar to some of the shapes and colours used by myself. Their goal of "Transforming invisible physical index data that represents chronic pain as art can provide patients with an overall visual feedback of their pain experience and how it changes over time. " (Tong et al 2014, p. 1) being much more focused on achieving a set of fixed correspondences between colours and shapes and the pain experienced, whilst I'm more concerned with visualising the complex human condition of feeling pain, one that also has an emotional landscape. At the same time I'm always careful to ensure that everyone also is aware that these are images made by an artist, and even though these images are made in response to a back and forth, critique and edit process, I am in the end the originator of the colours, forms and shapes used. As to how other humans receive our collaborative and complex visual communications, I'm not sure, but it is interesting to set them out as a comparison with the work of Tong et al., especially as by putting them on black backgrounds Tong et al make their forms somewhat like fireworks exploding in a dark sky. I also like Tong et als idea that their forms are like some sort of self illuminating jellyfish moving in dark waters and as I do I begin to see a family of forms begin to cluster in my visual mind. Which may be more to do with the sorts of correspondence we find in magic rather than in any scientifically verifiable activity. 

From: Tong et al 2014

Each of the images below is an attempt to visualise pain, what I think is interesting is that although these images are built up from agreements with several other people who have these pains, there is no clear correspondence between them except they were all made by myself. So are these images in reality simply my own visualisations of pain and they are not really proper collaborations? Should my idea of developing a new pain chart have to be parked? I shall see. But at the moment my worries about subjectivity are growing and I begin to wonder if all I have done is give myself opportunities to engage in image making that stretch my capacity for visual invention, rather than my making an objective visual record of a collaborate conversation. It is very hard to remove myself from the process. 

Images of people in pain

Reference

Tong, X., Gromala, D., Shaw, C. and Clarke, P., 2014, July. Transformation between Electronic Arts and Chronic Pain: Long-term Body Activity Data Visualisation and Pain Animation. In Electronic Visualisation and the Arts (EVA 2014). BCS Learning & Development.

See also:

Decor Art

Fireworks

Drawing and healing traditions

A highway code for pain

Ibrahim el Salahi pain relief drawings.

Observer-Patch Holography

In OPH, 3+1D de-Sitter space emerges as the conformal group of the S² screen supplies the 3+1D Lorentz symmetry, while modular flow and generalized entropy stationarity project boundary data inward to construct temporal and radial bulk dimensions. Each observer experiences a 3+1D universe.

I've been looking at what is called Observer-Patch Holography. Any reader of this blog will realise that every now and again I dip my toe into what's going on in science, because it can illuminate what I'm trying to think about in refreshing, if often challenging ways. OPH as it is known, is a recent development in the struggle to find a unifying theory, that will explain how everything fits together and works as it does. OPH proposes that gravity, particles and quantum mechanics all emerge from the same idea. That is that no single observer sees everything. Wow, this seems totally counter intuitive but at the same time somehow obvious. I have been hosting workshops whereby I get two people to work together in order to take their individual responses to visualising an interoceptual experience and to see how between them they can push the various visual elements they have invented around and adjust them, so that what they come up with communicates something to both of them. This is a basic process that explores how one person's subjective experience, can when overlapped with another's, gradually become something that can be communicated to someone else. I. e. what was an invisible subjective experience, eventually becomes part of someone else's reality.

Two people developing a cooperative image during a visualising interoception workshop 

OPH proposes that reality is a structure that any consistent set of observers must produce. But no one observer can see everything, therefore reality has to survive agreement across overlaps. I'm no mathematician, so I don't understand the underlying equations, however it seems as if you give each observer a holographic like screen into which is embedded their view of what is happening and as well as this you determine some sort of locality or co-ordinates within which this observer is observing, then you can develop a series of equations summing up that view, from one standpoint's reality. Then imagine other observers' realities also being similarly fixed into being by a set of equations and adding into this the idea that you can overlap all of these realities. This overlapping is what makes one observer's subjective reality, into a reality that is everybody's objective reality. This is as if the observer aspect of quantum theory, becomes central to the theory, instead of it being a bit of a problem. This article, Observers are all you need is a useful read if you want to get a proper scientific understanding of the idea. 

Each observer's reality will overlap with another's

What I like about this is that my reality overlaps with yours and that we are all embedded into the unthinkably vast holographic screen S2.

OPH tries to explain several of physics’ deepest open questions as symptoms of the same underlying architecture. For instance; general relativity predicts that spacetime must have a boundary in the past, something we usually call the big bang. Some proposals replace the Big Bang with a “bounce” from a previous contracting phase. Others suggest the universe emerged from quantum fluctuations in “nothing.” None is established. The assumption is that spacetime is fundamental, so asking “what happened at t = 0?” is the fundamental question. However, OPH reframes the question entirely. spacetime is now emergent, it is reconstructed from the consistency of overlapping observer descriptions. So instead of an idea of a single point in time when everything began, we need to think of zooming into a digital photo. At some point you hit pixels. You can’t zoom into the underlying structure any further, not because there’s a “wall,” but because the structure doesn’t support a finer resolution. The image doesn’t have a “beginning” at the pixel level. It just doesn’t have sub-pixel information. The holographic screen has limits, a finite capacity (about 10¹²² states). In OPH, time is relational, defined by how observer patches correlate. At the “earliest” times, OPH theorists believe that patches become maximally mixed. There’s no meaningful “before” because there’s no information to distinguish earlier from later.

I have posted before on the hard problem of consciousness and how I think drawing might help us to think about it. There is an OPH answer to this question too. I like so many other people before me I have asked the question 'why is there a something that is the feeling tone that is me?' Subjective experience, is questionable, but I have it, so I believe in it. Physics and science describe matter and forces, but not experience, which is where I always felt art came in.

In physics equations describe objective states of the universe. Observers are incidental. But experience is inherently first-person. You can describe every neuron firing in my brain, map every chemical reaction and still not explain why there’s a “what it’s like” to be me feeling. However, in OPH, the fundamental elements of the universe aren’t objective states, they’re 'observer patches', local, partial, subjective descriptions made by observers. Subjectivity isn’t something that emerges from physics. It’s what physics is built out of. OPH starts with subjects (observers with partial descriptions) and derives the appearance of an objective world from the consistency of their overlapping perspectives. Stuff like atoms and gluons are what my perspective, your perspective and others agree on. Essentially, you get the appearance of matter from the consistency of minds. Observers are therefore the foundation of everything.

I do worry that OPH begins with an idea about screens though. I suspect this is a reaction to their every present nature in our times. But it's an interesting enough idea to follow, so bare with me. OPH uses a holographic screen, that has a topology S^2.  My understanding of the associated expressions with grouping symbols is that S1 is a circle, S2 is a standard sphere, and S3 exists in 4D space. The particular topology is important because it enables someone to use the geometry of motion using variables like displacement, time, velocity and acceleration to analyse position over time, in this case the kinematics of a 3+1 dimensional Lorentzian spacetime. The holographic screen has a finite-capacity that has within it overlapping observer patches. So if the physics we use is derived from this, it explains why the ordinary physics we already use turns out to be the natural thing to see. For instance; in OPH, particles are stable excitation patterns in the overlap and transport of data. If a transport propagates coherently across patches, and can be read consistently by many observers, that’s is exactly the sort of thing we call a particle. OPH equations give us photons, gluons and even gravitons, as well as more detailed mass outputs. 

In OPH, particles are stable transport obstructions across patch overlaps

In OPH, all particle masses are derived from a single constant P ≡ a_cell/ℓ_P², the shared dimensionless “pixel-area” constant that converts the holographic screen’s regulated microphysics into absolute lab units. Once P has been fixed, everything comes from it.

The researchers behind the development of OPH ask us to metaphorically, think of P as a “simulation setting”. The only way of determining this setting is by reverse-engineering its value from certain properties of reality. 

The architecture of OPH is based on a finite octahedral cellulation of the holographic screen. Overlapping patches communicate via a specialised synchronisation API, (mechanisms that enable two software components to communicate with each other using a set of definitions and protocols) which extracts shared readout packets to detect mismatch syndromes. When discrepancies are found, a dedicated repair loop executes local corrections to the registers, ensuring that the disparate observer perspectives remain unified and physically consistent. This again reminds me of my interoception workshops, whereby either myself or another person in the workshop helps with the communication between two other people trying to establish a shared idea of what might constitute for instance, the shape and colour of a particular type of pain. 

The researchers behind OPH have arrived at the strange loop hypothesis, whereby human consciousness is arrived at because the complexity of active symbols in the brain inevitably leads to self-reference. It goes like this, reality is a timeless structure that closes on itself; physical evolution gives rise to complex structure. Complex structure gives rise to minds. Minds give rise to ideas. Among those ideas comes an understanding of the structure of reality itself. This understanding is not external to the universe; it is one of the ways the universe becomes what it is. Physics gives rise to chemistry, chemistry to biology, biology to minds, minds to ideas and ideas are what we create physics from. In an OPH reality, everything is self-referential and the strange loop hypothesis is used to explain its own creation.

Escher visualises the strange loop hypothesis

OPH theorists believe that a consistent reality would be a self-referential, observer-bearing, timelessly consistent reality that closes on itself, eliminating the need for an external creator. Friedrich Nietzsche’s declaration that "God is dead", signified that Christian, metaphysical and absolute moral foundations had become unbelievable due to scientific, rational thought; something he believed would lead to a profound moral disorientation. However when I see images of evangelical nationalists and their tattoos that serve to signify their allegiance to Christian values, I sometimes feel that it is the God fearing that are destroying any moral world order we once had.

When I work as part of the group 'Drawing a life' I have to ask myself a question. "In what way is it different to draw a person speaking about him/herself from drawing somebody I have no idea about?" There is a difference, but there is it seems to me much slippage between the two experiences. The people I have no idea about still have their own phenomenal worlds and they will experience life in terms of species-specific, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames that are sometimes called their 'umwelt'. The structure of their 'umwelt' will though, just as the structure of any other creature's 'umwelt', such as the phenomenal world of the crab or the hedgehog, be one that has a certain commonalty amongst the species. In my case I am just one member of a species that is highly social, bipedal with a large, complex brain, that has a vertical forehead, smaller than average mammalian jaws and a high capacity for self-awareness and the pursuit of meaning. Therefore what I can do is project in my mind an idea that although I don't know someone, I might be able to guess something about what they are thinking; another OPH overlap. 

Again I'm brought back to empathy as being central to any overarching moral view on how we co-exist with the rest of the world. OPH suggests that although we all have subjective viewpoints, we also overlap in our beliefs. It is this area of overlap that allows us to communicate and come to some sort of agreement with others. In my view the overlap also exists in relation to my relationship with the wind, a stone, a kangaroo or a tree, by agreeing that we all have something in common, I am hopefully less likely to abuse these things and spend more time thinking about their needs as well as my own. I can see the attraction of a religion as it helps some of us come to terms with what can be seen as a meaningless life. But life is full of meaning and is a wonderful song of interconnectedness. A blackbird knows this and when I hear its song I know it too. 

Reference: https://floatingpragma.io/oph/

See also:

What is it to be human?

Life lines

The geometry of consciousness 

Visualising energy flow

What is embodiment? 

Invisible worlds