Making sense of pain

It’s been said many times, so many times I can’t locate the originator of the saying “humans are meaning-making machines” – no more so than when a person experiences pain. Whether it’s a stubbed toe, sprained ankle, thundering headache – or, in my case, weird and ongoing widespread body pain AKA fibromyalgia – we would like to make sense of what’s going on. And mostly we tell simple stories about what we were doing, what happened to the body and that’s that.

In the case of weird or persistent pains the challenge becomes harder. The original story might not fit any more, or because of that story, we limit what we do in case we do damage.

Now philosophers and other commentators have taken up the matter of what this experience really is: sensation or perception? Frankly, I don’t think this matters a jot to the people I see who…