Opioids Won't Solve The World's Chronic Pain

3/8/2018 Opioids Won't Solve the World's Chronic Pain.
This Idea Might
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/chasing-genius-albert-lin-pain-flow-states.html
Chasing Genius
Opioids Won't Solve the World's Chronic Pain.

This Idea Might
Spurred by his own experience, National Geographic Explorer Albert Lin is testing the power of
technology and the brain to heal.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/02/chasing-genius-albert-lin-pain-flow-states/ 1/16
3/8/2018 Opioids Won't Solve the World's Chronic Pain. This Idea Might
"What I learned in my physical experience is that so much of my reality is defined

entirely in my mind," says Lin, who began exploring alternative forms of therapy
for pain after undergoing an amputation.
P H OTO G R A P H BY B R U N A B O R TO L ATO
By Christina Nunez
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY 28, 2018
Transformational ideas can come from anywhere. From anyone. National

Geographic’s CHASING GENIUS is now soliciting ideas for how we can use the
power of connectivity to imagine a better world. Check out the challenge,
where the best idea can win $25,000.
Albert Lin has made a career of using technology to fuel big new
discoveries. He employed satellites and radar to seek Genghis Khan's
tomb. And he recently helped discover the remnants of an ancient Maya
megalopolis in the Guatemalan jungle using aerial scanning technology
called LiDAR.
Along the way, he's pioneered new technologies in crowdsourcing

and big data that have been used around the globe.
His work took a deeply personal turn when a vehicle accident
resulted in a below-knee amputation in 2016. The research scientist and
engineer became "partially bionic," he says, turning his attention to the
frontiers of our minds and bodies.
Lin, a member of National Geographic's CHASING GENIUS
Council, talked recently about where his experience has led him so far and
where he'll go next.
YO U M I G H T A L S O L I K E
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Quiz: Which of These Pioneering Tech Ideas Are Real?
You suffered intense pain following the amputation. What
was that experience like, and how did you begin to look for
brainbased solutions?
I literally could not function. The pain was so excruciating and
constant that there was a point about a week or two weeks after the
amputation where I remember thinking to myself, I would rather have
died in the accident than have lived through it. They crazy thing was that I
was feeling the pain in a part of my body that was no longer there. It's
called “phantom pain.”
That's when I became very serious. I ended up meeting this world-
famous neuroscientist, V.S. Ramachandran. We started working together
on mirror therapy [which tricks the brain into seeing the missing limb in
an attempt to remap the body in the mind]. It sort of worked, but then the
effects would dissipate. I had to find some way of freeing my mind up so
the remapping could hold. That's when we started doing all sorts of other
things: kundalini yoga sessions, breathing meditations, sensory
deprivation tanks, unstructured music, psychedelic therapy.
I was exploring these cultural “technologies” that transport us to
these neuroplastic states. If I could do that in an intention-driven way, I
could remap my brain and ultimately my perceptions of pain. There's
many pathways to these states. In fact the greatest expressions of culture
may have evolved out of a desire to chase those states, and tapping into
that is where I believe you will find the essence of the “human potential.”
You describe using flow states in your research. Talk more
about that?
My interpretation of "flow," a term first described by Mihaly
Csikszentmihalyi, is when your ego drops away and you're completely in
the moment. The reason why I think that's so important is because
whatever happens in that moment, I've found, is when I'm the most
neuroplastic. My brain is able to let go of its map or construct of the world
and reorient itself to some new reality. I've often found that when I'm truly
in flow, I come out of it and it feels like I just went through some deep
meditation.
Lin began as a National Geographic Explorer searching for Genghis Khan's tomb
in Mongolia using satellites, ground-penetrating radar, and other technology.
P H OTO G R A P H BY B E N H O R TO N , N AT I O N A L G EO G R A P H I C C R E AT I V E
Cultures have always created these things where we're trying to

basically remap realities within our minds because that's essentially how
the world was invented. The world was invented first in the mind, and then
it becomes real. So out of the necessity for relief from constant and
debilitating pain, I took this approach with my experience of having a
phantom limb.
It's not going to be fixed by opioids or anything else like that,
because I am feeling pain where there is no longer biology. It's going to be
fixed by some more basic understanding of my mind and then using things
like mirror therapy to sort of trick my mind into another arena.
And if it worked with something like pain, why can’t it work in
other aspects of my world? It's been one of the most powerful experiences
of my life. So now I'm trying to lab-ify it, to see just how far it can go.
How does that relate to the Center for Human Frontiers,
the research center you founded at University of California San
Diego?
What I'm trying to do with the Center for Human Frontiers is to
work with cognitive scientists, visual artists, anthropologists, and
engineers to quantify that and then apply it to how we actually look at a lot
of these things. We need to rethink the way we look at the power of the
mind, or the idea of placebo. That placebo is actually a really good thing—
maybe it's the most important thing of all.
If somebody feels like they're actually getting completely healed by,
I don't know, some energy work [for example], then thats a real thing,
because it's in their mind and its believed. And if “flow states” allow us to
get to that place where our minds can be plastic enough to retune to new
perspectives then we should look at how we get to flow.
Flow's not new. In fact, maybe it’s the motivation behind why we
have come up with things like ceremonies or temple. What we plan to do
now is go into the world looking for the type of practices or “technologies”
that have been developed throughout cultures in our human attempt to
achieve flow, learn from those, and then try to experiment with ways to
bring that into how we design our future.
What opportunities do you see with our current
technology?
What we can do with the technology angle is measure certain
markers of this, like your brain state or your heart rate variability, then
create these virtual reality augmentations that amplify that experience. I
am lucky to be working with some incredible people on this now—folks like
Sheldon Brown, who directs the Clarke Center for Human Imagination,
and Ramesh Rao, whose work on “bliss buzzers” really inspired me. I am
also working with some unbelievable musicians, “explorers of flow.” We
can basically start to experiment with culture and the mind through a new
age of sensors and augmented mediums.
I feel like we're inventing the world as we speak. Our world as it
exists today is at a transitional moment. It's this weird blend where our
minds aren't really in our bodies, they're sort of beyond our bodies. Our
minds extend into both the analog and the digital world. So much of your
mind might exist in the device in your hands. We fear things like AI taking
over the world or the loss of humanity. Instead of trying to stop the
progress of technology, it may be more useful for us to try to figure out
how to use those tools to amplify our humanity.
You're also looking at how technology can help people get
access to prosthetics. Tell me more about that.
I hike through the jungles of Guatemala. I climb mountains. I surf.
Every time I see somebody with the same ailment, I realize how privileged
I am to have access to the leg I have built for me. I feel both gratitude and
an immense responsibility to do something. How can we use our
connectivity to change the model of how we access care?
If I need to have a teleportation of my body to a prosthetist so they
can fit my limb correctly to a mold, then that exists in our cyber world. In
archaeology, we're using all these things like photogrammetry or other
tools where you're trying to take low-cost camera gear and create 3D
models of artifacts in these harsh environments.
Now, even with cell phones, you can make these 3D models of
pretty much any object. There's 40 million amputees in the world, the
majority of which don't live in an area of the world where the amputee
population is well funded. Why don't we just turn their phones into the
portal that allows them to travel to an expert who can then have something
printed out [on a 3D printer] and sent to them? You can't expect to help 40
million people if you're telling them all to go to a super-expensive
prosthetist.
What's the status of your pain now?
It still comes back after a super long day here and there, but my
mental state of being, which I think really controls my physical state of
being, is one where I feel like, man—I just got out of the surf, right? So it's
been a really positive experience, learning that the power of my mind is so
much bigger than I realized before.
What I learned in my physical experience is that so much of my

reality is defined entirely in my mind, from that phantom limb pain to
whether or not this is a big catastrophe in my life to whether or not it's one
of the greatest gifts in my life.
Follow Albert Lin on Instagram: @exploreralbert
Christina Nunez is a writer and frequent contributor to National Geographic.
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3/8/2018 Opioids Won't Solve the World's Chronic Pain.

This Idea Might

Opioids Won't Solve the World's Chronic Pain.

"What I learned in my physical experience is that so much of my reality is deﬁned

Transformational ideas can come from anywhere. From anyone. National

Along the way, he's pioneered new technologies in crowdsourcing

How Your Brain May One Day Control Your Computer

Now People Who Need It Can Text for Food Aid

Quiz: Which of These Pioneering Tech Ideas Are Real?

Cultures have always created these things where we're trying to

What I learned in my physical experience is that so much of my

Christina Nunez is a writer and frequent contributor to National Geographic.

FROM THE WEB Sponsored By ZergNet

New Species of 'Water The Untold Truth of 15 Famous People Who

Ancient Animal Could

Best of February 2018

New Photo Shows

Animals, Like Wasps,

Giant Anteater Faces

Who Was the Most

Cities Emit 60% More

The Last Ship to Bring

Illegal Gold Mining

See What Life Is Like

Faceless Toad Found

Sunken World War II

Why Cape Town Is

Rare Baby Bird Fossil

What Ancient African

There's Only One Way

The World Has Two

© 1996-2018 National Geographic Society.

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