Why Do You Hurt?

Pain is a strange sensation unlike any other we experience.

While most of our senses have a clear, specific stimulus they’re responding to, pain doesn’t play by those rules.

Vision is all about light, picking up on a certain part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Hearing is all about sound waves.

But pain? Pain doesn’t have a single special stimulus. It’s often a response to tissue damage or the threat of tissue damage, but that’s not always the case. Sometimes, we feel pain when there is no threat or damage.

We know pain — it’s that raw, primal feeling that can turn the strongest among us into a curse-word jackpot machine.

And yet, despite its familiarity, pain remains one of the more puzzling phenomena in neuroscience. It turns out that explaining what’s going on in the brain during these seemingly simple events is not so simple.

In last week’s article, we explored Gertler’s thought experiment on disembodied pain. We discussed her view that pain has no hidden essence — that pain is a subjective experience fully accessible through introspection. This week, as we explore the neuroscience of pain, we might want to ask:

Can neuroscience reveal anything about the nature of pain that we can’t get through introspection alone?

Pain is a combination of sensation with emotion and cognition. And it turns out that these three aspects of pain follow different pathways in the brain.

* The painfulness pathway

* The suffering pathway, and

* The pain suppression pathway

This week, let’s review these three pain pathways and explore how they work together to create our complex experience of pain.

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