We’ve Been Thinking About Pain All Wrong
To control physical and emotional pain, we need to understand its purpose.
If you ask most people to explain how pain works, they’ll say something like, “Well, you have an injury, and the ‘signal’ travels up to your brain, and your brain interprets it as pain.”
Sounds plausible, right?
It’s essentially the same theory René Descartes described in his 1664 Treatise of Man. Descartes believed a “little thread” transferred pain to the brain, “just as, by pulling one end of a cord, you ring a bell which hangs at the other end.”
It’s a nice analogy — but it’s utterly wrong. According to today’s science, almost exactly the opposite is true.
“The type of thinking captured in Descartes’ model has led to some amazing advances in clinical medicine,” wrote Lorimer Moseley, arguably the world’s foremost pain scientist. “But the evidence against it is now almost as compelling as that against the world being flat.”
Here’s how we’ve been thinking about pain all wrong and why understanding pain’s purpose helps us control it, rather than letting it control us.
