You are supposed to say “ouch”
For reasons I may or may not get around to writing about I have had some considerable amount of experience with various sorts of pain lately. So I found this NYT article by Austin Frakt, If ‘Pain Is an Opinion,’ There Are Ways to Change Your Mind particularly interesting. It seems, for example, that I was a captive of a common ‘naïve’ fallacy:
One thing we tend to believe about pain, but is wrong, is that it always stems from a single, fixable source. Another is that pain is communicated from that source to our brains by “pain nerves.” That’s so wrong it’s called “the naïve view” by neuroscientists.
In truth, pain is in our brain. Or as the author and University of California, San Diego, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran put it, “Pain is an opinion.” We feel it because of how our brain interprets input transmitted to it from all our senses, not necessarily because of the inherent properties of the input itself. There are no nerves dedicated to sensing and transmitting pain.
But I’m not taking up the trumpet (read the article).
