If my patients’ brains could feel me touching them they would need a second brain somewhere to register the sensation. Since the only parts of the head that feel pain are the skin and muscles and tissues outside the brain it is possible to carry out brain surgery under local anaesthetic with the patient wide awake. Besides, the brain does not come with dotted lines saying ‘Cut here’ or ‘Don’t cut there’ and tumours of the brain usually look, more or less, like the brain itself, so it is easy to cause damage.
