Touch a hot stove, the story goes, and a signal races from your finger along your spinal cord to your brain. Your brain perceives the danger and dispatches an urgent message to your hand. You yank your hand away.
Scientists now say pain is more complex than that.
It's more like the Internet than an old-fashioned switchboard. A single stimulus may prompt multiple signals throughout the body. The pain you feel reflects an interaction between your basic cellular and genetic makeup, your current health, your emotional state, the situation in which the pain occurs, your past encounters with pain, and what you know and think about pain. Whether you are male or female also influences how much pain you have, what type of pain it is, and how treatment affects you. The conference was the first to be wholly devoted to this topic.