The Role of Expectations in Pain Research

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I'm not an expert, but my rough impression is that we don't know embarrassingly little about pain and how it works. And some of those factors are our own expectations. Even within a certain individual, their experiences vary tremendously from context to context in ways that just aren't tracking the organic as well. So what's probably happening is that different contexts are activating different expectations of pain or disability. Without the standard organic cause change in any way, that's making a difference to how you feel and what you can do.

What is the mind, and what does it try to do? An overly simplified materialist view might be that the mind emerges from physical processes in the brain. But you can be a materialist and still recognize that there is more to the mind than just the brain: the rest of our bodies play a role, and arguably we should count physical artifacts that contribute to our memory and cognition as part of "the mind." Or so argues today's guest, philosopher/cognitive scientist Andy Clark. As to what the mind does, it tries to predict what happens next. This simple idea provides a powerful lens through which to interpret all the different things our minds do, including the idea that "perception is controlled hallucination."

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Andy Clark received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Sussex. He is currently Professor of Cognitive Philosophy at Sussex. He was Director of the Philosophy/Neuroscience/Psychology Program at Washington University in St Louis, and Director of the Cogntive Science Program at Indiana University. His new book is The Experience Machine: How Our Minds Predict and Shape Reality.

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