Pain isn't a signal from damaged tissue reaching your brain. It's your brain's opinion about danger, shaped by prior experiences, beliefs, and context. The speaker traces how we've understood pain from ancient yin-yang imbalance to modern neuroscience.
What is the explanation for pain? The explanation for pain has changed over history. You know, back 5,000 years ago, the explanation for pain was it was an imbalance of your yin and your yang. And around the 5th century, it became a different animal. They said that pain was essentially not a sensation but emotion. It originated in your heart. Then we got into the 14th century, and the idea was that If you're experiencing pain, clearly this is retribution by God, that it had a more godlike origin. And then we got the great boogeyman of the 17th century, boogeyman for the yoga practitioners perhaps, René Descartes, who said that the body and the mind are 2 separate worlds. This idea of pain was a machine idea of pain. It was the idea that if you stick your foot in the fire, there are nerves which are responsible only for pain, and they take that Up to your brain and you have this experience of pain. It's a very mechanistic idea of pain. So what is pain? Pain is your brain's opinion about danger. That's a way to think of it. I think it's fairly accurate. Pain is your brain's opinion about danger. So you can see in this diagram, if this tissue area, you have some kind of problem with your tissue, the information is sent up the spine. The spine, with its experiences, beliefs, knowledge, body image, et cetera, sort of scrutinizes and makes decisions. You have an output or an action and response. So your pain is constantly trying to keep you safe, and your pain— your brain is trying to say, is this dangerous or not? And that's really a way to conceptualize whether something is going to be painful or not.
