Description
As a disease, chronic pain is seen to arise from a localized lesion in the brain. They are not quite saying that brains feel pain, but that brains (when disordered) make us feel chronic pain. Giving pain a home in the brain may provide benefits in the form of new therapeutic targets. Imagine lying inside a massive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, your head surrounded by a 10-foot-wide white magnetic doughnut. While you lie there, daydreaming, the scientists in the room next door monitor the patterns of activity that flicker around in your brain.