Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently

by Beau Lotto

Like color and everything else we experience in our awareness, pain takes place in the brain and absolutely nowhere else. There isn’t a sensation taking place inside your arm after your bone snaps, on your skin while your thumb bleeds, or around your eye as the area purples. Of course, it feels this way, but in fact this is nothing but an incredibly useful perceptual projection. The pain isn’t taking place anywhere but in your brain, by way of a complex neurophysiological process, although this doesn’t make the ex perience any less real. Your nociceptors, a special type of neuron or nerve ending, register damage and relay a message to your nervous system, which includes your brain. (Nociceptors aren’t distributed evenly around the body; fingertips and nipples and other areas that are particularly sensitive to touch have—by definition—significantly more nociceptors than other parts, like elbows.) In this sense, something objectively physiological does happen with pain, but it is the meaning of the cause we perceive, not the cause itself.