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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.
Two Snake Bites: One Real, One Fake
Moseley became interested in pain because of a weird personal experience he had while camping with friends south of Sydney. While walking barefoot along a riverbank to take a dip in the river, he felt something scratch his ankle. Thinking nothing of it, he brushed it off, kept walking, and got into the cool water.
The next thing Moseley recalls is waking up in a hospital bed. He’d been bitten by an eastern brown snake — one of most venomous snakes on earth. Doctors told Moseley he was lucky to be alive, but what astonished Moseley was what happened when he ventured back into the bush six months later.
As he set out on a hike in a nearby national park with a companion, Moseley again felt something scratch his ankle. But this time, he was immediately overwhelmed with agony, describing the sensation as, “a white hot poker of pain screaming up my leg.”
Fearing the worst, his friend called an ambulance. However, there was no snake bite this time.
