ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
A couple of months ago, I was reading a graphic novel with my children, and one of the characters voiced this well-constructed line: “Food is the prize of living.” The simplicity of the thought appealed to me—that life comes with a handful of pleasures that compel us to march onward and, in some instances, serve as fuel for that march. But as we at The Scientist assembled this issue on the science of pain, my mind eventually wandered to the other side of that coin. If pleasures such as food, laughter, or dreams are the prizes of living, I thought, then surely pain is the penalty.
Pain is a penalty we all pay, to some degree. The lucky among us experience it only intermittently: the ...
