Edward Adelson’s checker board illusion (above) plays a trick on the brain. Take a look on the left image; the A square looks darker than B. However, as you can see on the right, they’re the exact same shade of grey. Still, when you look back at the left image, the brain is tricked again. You can’t help but see the B square as lighter.
What exactly is happening here?
Your brain is making a mistake, in an effort to help you see depth and shadows. Vision isn’t straightforward like a camera, simply relying on your eyes and visual cortex. Seeing involves complex brain processing, incorporating the temporal lobe, parietal lobe, and frontal lobe; your brain references contextual information and prior knowledge about the visual world to generate images (Libedinsky & Livingstone, 2011; Purves D, et al., 2001; Rahnev et al., 2016).
This means when you’re looking at the checkerboard above, the colour and lightness of objects you’re seeing is not just determined by your eyes (Troscianko, & Osorio, 2023). Neuroscience research suggests, when it comes to certain optical illusions, it’s in frontal lobe processing where mistakes are made (Steinberg et al., 2024).
“It’s really important to understand we’re not seeing reality;
we’re seeing a story that’s created for us”
– Patrick Cavanagh, Neuroscientist, Harvard Dept. of Psychology
Like vision, chronic pain and symptoms aren’t produced by just one area of the brain. When deciphering signals from the body, your brain references pre-existing information in the brain like belief, context, and memory to determine if your body is in danger. In neuroscience, this is called predictive coding; the brain continuously generates predictions about incoming sensory information based on its internal model of the world.
The takeaway? The pain/symptom you’re experiencing isn’t purely objective, based only on input signals from the physical body. Much like an optical illusion, the brain can make mistakes when processing sensory input, sensing danger and trying to protect unnecessarily (Moseley & Moen, ND; Gordon & Ziv, 2021). And these neuroplastic symptoms feel every bit as real!
How Do I Know if My Chronic Pain/Symptoms Are The Result of Brain Mistake?
The first step in healing is assessing your symptoms to determine if your pain/symptoms are neuroplastic (Schubiner et al., 2024). To get started on this, we encourage you to take our self-assessment quiz.
Once you gather evidence and come to recognize your pain/symptom is neuroplastic, you can begin the healing work.
Healing neuroplastic pain/symptoms involves a mix of show and tell. By assessing and gathering evidence, you tell the brain you’re actually safe and there’s no need for pain/symptom generation or avoidance. By engaging in exposure-based practices and regulating your nervous system, you show your brain it is safe – it doesn’t need to generate symptoms to protect you.
How Can Desensitize Help Me?
At this point, you may be curious about the specific steps for retraining your pain system. Don’t worry; we’ve got you covered. The Densensitize app walks you through every step, providing video based education, detailed self-assessment tools, behaviour change plans, guided meditations, tools to process emotions and trauma, and strategies to increase your sense of social safety.
We’ve brought together the newest, most effective, evidence-based tools from Pain Reprocessing Therapy, Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy, Polyvagal
Theory, Mindfulness, Qigong, Somatic Experiencing, and more.
Through an in-depth, comprehensive approach, you can restore safety between your brain and body. Sign up for the Desensitize app today!