2025-06-21
39 分钟The Economist
There's more than one kind of pain,
but on today's show we're going to be talking about the physical kind,
the kind that registers in our brains as having a cause.
I stub my toe, ouch, my toe hurts.
But pain researchers know that's only part of the story.
What registers in the brain isn't always matched to what's happening around the body.
Sometimes there isn't a location.
source of pain to point to.
But that isn't even the most mysterious thing about our perceptions.
It's that they can be changed.
The whole pain-sensing network can become hypersensitized by a life that's, simply put, too stressy.
And where the stress comes from war,
that can make for a national epidemic of inexplicable but very real pain.
I'm Jason Palmer, and this is The Weekend Intelligence.
My colleague Wendell Stevenson is no stranger to war.
You'll have heard her reporting on the intelligence before.
Now, she's no stranger to maddeningly intense pain.
In between bouts of reporting on Ukraine's war, she's been trying to trace the source of it.
And she ended up getting a crash course in the science and the psychology of suffering.