I’ve written about the science of pain in a previous post. That discussed some interesting findings from studies in the 1940’s and highlighted the difficulty in measuring pain in an objective manner. According to this article on brain imaging, that last part may be about to change. Researchers have managed to train a computer model (via machine learning) to analyze MRI scans and predict the level of pain experienced.
The part I found particularly interesting was that the responses across different patients brains was very uniform. They didn’t have to sample a patients pain at say levels 1 and 2 to be able to predict what that patients brain would look like at level 5 or 6. The same predictive model could be used across all patients. Meaning that they could take an MRI scan in from any patient and accurately estimate the level of pain experienced.
That seems counter-intuitive because we have a concept we call pain tolerance. Some people are as tough as nails and others are delicate daisies. Yet the underlying brain mechanism seems to be fairly uniform. Everyone’s brain fires up in similar ways to similar degrees of stimulus. That suggests to me that people’s baseline tolerance to pain, before endorphins and adrenalin kicks in to modulate the signal, is a learned response. You’re not pre-programmed to have a specific tolerance and presumably it could be modified over time.
I’ll leave you with an image of somebody doing a pain experiment of her own. She seems to have neglected the MRI scanner to measure the exact effects but perhaps this is just a practice run. Judging by his expression she should have no problem getting a reading from him.
I found the image on the Some Husbands Need Discipline tumblr. The original commercial site is sadly now extinct.