Daniel Boltz kisses
his eight-month-old
daughter, Peyton,
before giving her a
bath. Peyton was born
with neonatal absti-
nence syndrome after
her mother used heroin
during the pregnancy.
Peyton spent two
months in the neona-
tal intensive care unit
at Penn State Children’s
Hospital in Hershey,
Pennsylvania, being
weaned from opioids.
Studies on the long-
term effects are limited
so far, but researchers
have found that babies
born with the condition
are more sensitive
to pain than healthy
newborns and also
may face cognitive,
behavioral, and devel-
opmental problems.
DAVID GUTTENFELDERof reducing pain. I experienced the power of the
technique firsthand at the lab of Luana Colloca,
a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland.
One of Colloca’s assistants strapped a little box
onto my left forearm as I sank into a comfortable
recliner. The device was similar to the one that
Machado’s group had used: Connected to a com-
puter by a cable, it was capable of heating up and
cooling down rapidly. In my right hand, I held
a controller with a button that I could press to
stop the heating on my arm. “Don’t worry; you
won’t get burned,” the assistant reassured me.
In the first few trials, Colloca asked me to
press the button as soon as I felt the device get-
ting warm. In the next few rounds, I had to wait
a little longer until the device felt uncomfortably
hot; in the final series of trials, I had to switch it
off only when it felt too hot to bear.
Colloca then led me through the same
sequence while wearing virtual reality goggles,
which immersed me in an oceanic environment.
Soothing music played in my ears as I watched
dazzlingly colored fish flitting through the water,
which was lit up by sunlight filtering down from
above. Large iridescent jellyfish floated past.
Periodically I felt the device heating up the skin
on my forearm, reminding me that I hadn’t gone
scuba diving.
When the experiment ended, Colloca showed
me the temperatures I had allowed the device
to reach in all the trials. The readings for what
I felt to be “warm,” “hot,” and “unbearably hot”
were all higher during the immersive experience.
Specifically, the hottest temperature I could han-
dle without flinching had gone up by 2.7 degrees
Fahrenheit, to 118 degrees Fahrenheit, which in
Colloca’s view was “huge.”
“That means you were tolerating a much,
much higher level of pain when you were
immersed in this environment along with calm-
ing music,” she says.
Scientists don’t yet know for sure why virtual
reality has this positive effect on pain tolerance.
Some hypothesize it works through distraction:
by engaging networks that would otherwise be
involved in signaling and perceiving pain. Others
speculate that it works by regulating emotions
and altering mood. Colloca has shown that the
key driver of the benefit is the entertainment
provided by the experience, which helps relax
patients and reduce their anxiety. Whatever the
mechanisms underlying its effectiveness, doctors
already are using virtual reality to help patients
in acute pain, such as those with severe burns.
Colloca believes the strategy also could prove
useful in treating chronic pain.EVERY MONTH, Norris leads a meeting of a sup-
port group that he helped found a few years ago
through the American Chronic Pain Association.
The goal is to provide members with informal
group therapy, applying the emerging scientific
insight that our thoughts and feelings can alter
our experience of pain.
I joined Norris at a recent gathering at a Los
Angeles church, and he introduced me to the
members as they trickled in. (To respect their
privacy, I decided not to ask for their last names.)
One of them, a slender young man named Brian,
shook my hand. When I explained to him, as I
did with the others, that I’d come to listen, not to
participate, he joked: “Maybe we should punch
you in the face so you can relate.”
There were 10 of us in all—five men and five68 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC