Feeling Pain That Is Not There

By Amy Broadway, Researcher at the Brogaard Lab for Multisensory Research

Like visual or auditory sensations, the body sensation 'pain' informs us about the world, or at least our experience in it. After I touched a hot plate, damaged cells from my fingers sent signals through my spinal cord to my brain, where I apprehended unpleasantness. This motivated me to remove my hand from the plate. The stimulus in this case was the heat burning my hand, telling me, ‘HEY! Don’t touch that!’Sometimes, though, people feel pain when there seems to be no stimulus generating it.

People with pain disorder experience pain that medical doctors cannot explain. A person may distinctly feel a throbbing backache, yet doctor after doctor cannot give a physical reason for it. Clinicians conclude that these patients’ pain stems from their psyches rather than physical conditions. We know of course the mind is intertwined with the body. If there are no structural reasons for a backache, like a slipped disk or muscle injury, pain may originate in an active perception by the mind (i.e. nervous system) as opposed to passive reception of content.

People with mirror-touch synesthesia, another cognitive condition, experience sensations they observe in other people. If they see someone else slapped on the cheek, they experience matching cheek pain. You could say they have a high level of empathy. Their pain does not reflect the truth of their own corporeal state but their visual understanding of another person’s.

To people with mirror-touch synesthesia or pain disorder, pain may not correlate to any bodily injury. Yet these people have a temporospatial experience of pain in the body. They feel a certain ‘texture’ or ‘volume’ of pain for a certain length of time, as if something was happening to their bodies. One reason this is perplexing is it seems they have a kind of ‘false pain.’ We may even be tempted to say they are wrong about what they are feeling because their feelings do not correlate to anything ‘real,’ but feeling pain seems like something one cannot be wrong about.

While I may hallucinate a visual or auditory sensation, it seems odd to say I can hallucinate pain. We think of pain as self-intimating. If you have an episode of pain, you know you are in pain and cannot be mistaken about it, just as I cannot be mistaken about the words I am thinking right now. You may be wrong about the origin of pain, but it seems wrong to say you can be wrong about being in pain.This points to a difference between the sensation, or perception of pain, and the sensation of something visual or auditory. Y

You can hallucinate something visually, believing your are seeing something in the world that other people cannot see. If you think you see a pink elephant and the elephant is not actually there, what you think you see is not real. Your senses are deceiving you. Likewise, you can be mistaken about hearing something, which is dependent on external stimuli to be true. On the other hand, pain seems to be something you cannot be wrong about, as it is directly part of your consciousness.