Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction

by Judith Grisel

In contrast to our other senses, pain is especially critical to our survival, and the sense is more like an individualistic lens that can open and close gates of sensory experience. For instance, blind, deaf, or anosmic people (the last are those with no sense of smell) are all likely to live a normal life span, but this is not the case for those who are born with a congenital insensitivity to pain who almost invariably die young, from complications following an injury. Moreover, simply snipping a pair of cranial nerves could quickly render someone blind, deaf, or anosmic—the pathways are relatively simple, discrete, and well characterized. Pain is processed redundantly and diffusely, and there is simply no surgical intervention to relieve chronic pain (as many medical doctors and their patients know too well). Instead, pain recruits overlapping pathways and circuits throughout the body and brain and, along with a rich neurochemistry of opioids and anti-opiates, portends the critical nature of pain for our survival.