By Tyler Broyles

[WARNING: if you're not prepared for images of hooks through skin, please don't click]

Hooks, tattoos, blood, electrocutions, muscle control and phantom limbs? Oh – and did I mention pain?

These are the reasons we are in a long looping queue for entry to the Powerhouse Museum. Pain is fascinating and a night where the science behind the agony is de-mystified is too good to miss.

A Powerhouse rep is working her way down the queue, getting people to sign release forms. Wait, release forms? I’m sure it’s a legal thing  — but it’s also a good way to raise anticipation levels!

We sign our release forms and shuffle into the crowded foyer. Host Natasha Mitchell announces the first suspension will happen in 20 minutes. Right into the action!

We head to the bar for a drink to calm our nerves. On return, suspension artist Ben – in a leather cap & leather undies – tells the crowd they will either be “repulsed” or “attracted” by the sight.

“These reactions come from the same place,” he says.

He tells us he’s about to enter “a quiet place” of mental focus. Then, he lies facedown and two be-masked “inserters” from Polymorph descend upon him and begin to thread thick metal barbs and hooks into his calves, lower and upper back.

“Gross! Ouch!” Is my first reaction … but this is science right? Tonight we’re thinking past these instinctive reactions towards what is happening and why. (Where’s the blood?).

The team are in great spirits, including Ben who will shortly be suspended by his flesh from the ceiling. (Where’s the blood?).

Natasha Mitchell speaks to him after the hooks are inserted and before he’s suspended to check in on his mental state.

Rob Valenti from Polymorph begins to attach Ben to metal cables hanging from the ceiling and we go to check on other happenings.

First stop is the fake hand table. As you can see – get a fake hand from a joke shop, mod a couple of paintbrushes and you could do this one at home kids!

She simultaneously strokes my real hand (invisible to me) and the fake hand (visible to me) with the paintbrush. She asks me to move a finger and when I do – I feel surprised the fake finger doesn’t move. Dr Seizova-Cajic wraps up by suddenly banging the fake hand with the purple block, at which you flinch and “feel” pain.

At another table Lorimer Moseley, pain expert and author, is electrocuting volunteers’ hands while assuring us that pain is the mind’s response to a perceived threat.

“Pain doesn’t exist anywhere but the brain,” he says later to Natasha.

If the brain’s pain triggers can be neutralised by removing the idea of threat then pain will go away. Or, if a bigger threat looms and a little bit of pain means survival the pain can vanish. He gives the example of the backpacker in Utah who chopped off his trapped arm with a pocket knife. Supposedly it didn’t hurt.

Hmmmm. I’m thinking about the time I stepped on and fully inserted a thumbtack into the ball of my foot one morning and fell to the ground screaming like a cracked-out hyena. Was the thumbtack a big enough threat to send such painful thoughts from my brain to my foot?
I’m thinking: I can’t handle a thumbtack and a man is about to be suspended by his flesh with hooks from the ceiling?

Something ain’t adding up. I head to the bar for another beer then back to the foyer to see Ben “fly”.

There’s gasps and an audible cringe from many as Ben is inched up and up until he’s swinging from the ceiling from hooks piercing his shoulders.

If you enjoyed the former – the video below is even better. His skin is stretched to what looks like tearing point – though it does look remarkably elasticised – and he begins spinning like a ballet dancer with a slight smile on his face.

If pain is all in the mind this man has Herculean mental strength, or he doesn’t perceive a threat and is released from the agony. It’s a bewildering  vision for those of us who’ve never seen it before. And a difficult concept to understand, for those of us who’ve never ruminated on it before.

Luckily Dr Shumack is there to explain. (And yes, he covers the blood bit).

Back at Moseley’s table, a volunteer is being electrocuted and asked to look away and focus on a stranger’s face for 10 seconds. “Remember a feature of the face,” Moseley says.

It’s a trick and she is electrocuted with little pain registered. Another volunteer is told to stare keenly at his hand up until the moment when the jolt comes. When it does, he jumps and exclaims. It hurt.

In some ways, it’s beginning to add up for me experientially. We all have a memory of not knowing we’re hurt until we see the blood right?  I never knew I hit my head on the diving board until everyone was jumping out of the pool to escape the bloody water. Maybe the pain is all in our head.

Back in the suspension area Ben is suspended again, this time horizontally by the backs of his calves as well.

Love or hate the sight – I am fast realising what an incredible organ this skin is.

I move on to the next table, where Michaela Davies is using electric currents to control volunteer’s arms. It’s a bizarre sensation to say the least.

I try it too. As she increases the current my arm moves upwards and turns into a strange claw-shape, pointing itself at me mockingly.

She asks me to try to lower my arm back to the table, but it’s impossible. There’s nothing there but it feels as though there’s a insurmountable resistance.

Dark Science is back this coming Friday night (28th August). This time, it’s Dark Science: Psyche.

“Psyche looks into your mind and confront your fears, be it spiders, snakes, bugs, death or needles. Psychologists will help you understand exactly what these things are and how they make you… well… YOU.”

Find out more here.

And see our guest blog posts by Rob Wilson on the topic, Judgement of the Flesh and Pain of the Flesh.

Tags: pain, perception, suspension, tattoo, touch

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