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Question When I feel a pain in my hand, is there anything about the pain which actually refers to my hand, or have I simply learned over time that certain pains are correlated with injuries in certain parts of my body?

Accepted:
April 17, 2008

Comments

If you just reflect on your own experience you can see that the feeling that the pain is in your hand is not merely a matter of having learned over time that certain feelings are caused by damage in certain areas; on the contrary, your hand, as we say, "hurts". Infants clearly show recognition of the locations of pains in their bodies, and yet they certainly haven't had sufficient experience to learn the requisite correlations. Also, notice that sometimes we're wrong. This happens with tooth pain a lot. We feel the pain in one tooth but it's actually caused by damage in a different tooth. How would this mistake even occur if there weren't something inherent in the feeling itself concerning which tooth hurt? One fairly simple way to account for the localization of pains is this: The relevant nerves in the damaged area send signals to the pain centers of the brain, which represent both the damage and the location of the damage. The identities of the nerves from which the message emanated, or their location, is presumably part of the information contained in the message that reaches the pain centers. So the feeling will encode both something about the nature of the damage and the location in which it occurred.

Question When I feel a pain in my hand, is there anything about the pain which actually refers to my hand, or have I simply learned over time that certain pains are correlated with injuries in certain parts of my body? Accepted:April 17, 2008

Question When I feel a pain in my hand, is there anything about the pain which actually refers to my hand, or have I simply learned over time that certain pains are correlated with injuries in certain parts of my body?

Accepted:
April 17, 2008