The Itch As Glitch: Deconstructing Externality and Sensation

Any meditator will undoubtedly be very familiar with our old friend, the itch. While I think the connections between scientific discoveries and Buddhist beliefs can be over-emphasised, in this article, taking uncontrollable itching as a starting point, Atul Gawande looks at the new light being thrown on the relationship between external objects, sensation, and consciousness.

Scientific developments are challenging what Gawande calls the ‘naïve view’ – that we perceive the world directly, that sensations transmitted by objects are ‘picked up by our nerve endings, transmitted through the spinal cord like a message through a wire, and decoded by the brain.’ Rather, he argues on the basis of this research, the mind is not so much decoding sensations, as constructing objects from signals, signals which are ‘radically impoverished’ compared with our experience of embodiment. On this view, perception, rather than being a response to external stimuli, is in fact the brain’s ‘best guess,’ or inference, about what’s ‘happening out there.’ Phenomena like phantom limb pain, or itching in places with no nerve endings, are what happens when the best guess happens to be wrong; and thus a solution might be possible if that guess can be adjusted – in the case of phantom limbs, by ‘mirror therapy’ through which patients appear to themselves to possess the missing limb.

What’s interesting about this from a Buddhist perspective, it seems to me, is that it dovetails with the teaching that our impression of our own embodied objectivity, and hence our whole concept of the ‘reality’ we inhabit, is illusory, and that in normal everyday life we do not have access to unmediated experience (indeed, this would suggest that there can be no such thing as unmediated experience, only the experience of experience as mediated – though the nature of meditative insights is not a subject on which I’d claim any authority from experience whatsoever). It seems to me (from my limited knowledge) that there’s a particular affinity here with Yogacara perspectives on cognition as constitutive of a (supposed) reality external to consciousness. The mind not only imposes particular constructions on objectively-experienced sensation as a result of contact with objectively-existing, separate external objects; all those sensations and separate objects exist as they are experienced only as a result of being constructed mind-objects, or dharmas.

As well as giving a new approach to problems like those mentioned above, this perspective on consciousness might also relate to new practices in dealing with pain. Rather than distraction - an older technique - Gawande notes that people with chronic pain are now often advised to ‘work through’ the pain, giving the body a chance to ‘reset’ pain sensors. Though it’s not mentioned in the article, there’s some fascinating work out there on mindfulness as a method of long-term pain management, which would seem to bear definite similarities.

I wouldn’t want in any way to diminish through comparison the agony people experience when dealing with these kinds of medical problems. But there is something fundamental here about the fact that our suffering can be our own creation, and that we may not be conscious of this, or, if we are, this intellectual understanding in itself does not serve to mitigate that suffering. Sakyamuni is often understood as a physician, and in identifying ‘everyday life’ itself as dukkha, we might ask what treatment we could use to help readjust our fundamentally faulty understanding – which brings us full circle, away from these abstracted intellectual meanderings and back to the cushion…