March 27, 2026

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The surprising science of pain can help you finally feel better

A pain scientist breaks down the surprising brain‑body science that explains why so many of us hurt more than we have to

By Kendra Pierre-Louis, Fonda Mwangi, Alex Sugiura & Naeem Amarsy

Grand Central Publishing; Scientific American Illustrations

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Kendra Pierre-Louis: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Kendra Pierre-Louis, in for Rachel Feltman.

From stubbing your toe to dealing with the occasional headache or sore back, to experience pain is to be human. And for minor aches and pains, the occasional over-the-counter medication is usually enough. But what happens if the pain we’re dealing with isn’t a one-off? What happens when that pain becomes chronic?

According to 2023 data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, roughly a quarter of U.S. adults experience chronic pain. Rachel Zoffness, a pain scientist and an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, San Francisco who also teaches pain science at Stanford University argues that pain is often misunderstood by the general public and by doctors. The end result, she says in her new book, Tell Me Where It Hurts: The New Science of Pain and How to Heal, is that many of us are suffering from more pain than necessary.

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I talked with Rachel about our misconceptions around pain and what we can do to reduce how much pain is in our lives. Here is our conversation.

So what got you into studying pain?

Rachel Zoffness: A couple of things. First of all, I was scared of pain. You know, pain’s an aversive experience, and I think most humans are scared of pain. But when I took my first neuroscience class as an undergrad nerd at Brown University, I discovered that pain lived at the intersection of all these things I wanted to study.

So I couldn’t decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. So I was taking neuroscience, and I was taking human biology, brain and behavior. I was taking psychology courses. And pain lived smack in the center of all of those things, and I really glommed onto it, so I ended up conducting my honors thesis on pain, neuroscience and the endogenous neurotransmitters that regulate pain, and I just really never stopped studying it.

Pierre-Louis: So it’s actually funny that we’re doing this interview today because I’m actually in pain. I tweaked my shoulder last week. [Laughs.] I’ve hit that age where it takes longer to bounce back. And basically, I think one of the questions that your book raises—and answers, I think—but at a basic level what is pain? Because so often we’re taught that pain is a signal, that you tweak your neck or you touch a hot stove and so you feel pain. It’s our body’s response to injury. But you say in your book that pain is a lot more nuanced than that. So in your definition what is pain?

Zoffness: Yeah, so simply put, pain is our body’s warning system. It’s our danger-detection system. And it’s adaptive and evolutionary, right? Like, pain helps us survive. It tells us, “Pay attention. You may need to change your behavior. Something dangerous and bad might be happening.”

The problem is that we’ve all been fed a lie. It’s a lie that really bothers me. And the lie we’ve been sold is that pain lives exclusively in the body part that hurts. Like, if we have chronic back pain, we will see 15 back doctors and maybe have multiple back surgeries and probably get some prescriptions. And those things can be helpful. But here’s the problem: many, many decades of neuroscience tell us that pain is ultimately constructed by the brain—of course, in concert with input from the body and also our environment.

But one of the reasons we know that pain is constructed by the brain is because of a condition called phantom limb pain. And phantom limb pain is when someone loses a limb, an arm or a leg, and they continue to have terrible pain in the missing body part. Now, if you can have terrible leg pain in a leg that is no longer attached to your body, that tells us pretty definitively that pain can’t just live in the body part alone. And of course, we now know pain is ultimately constructed by our brain and our central nervous system.

So, you know, what we know about pain is that it’s a lot bigger and more complex than we’ve been led to believe. But in my mind that’s actually good news, not bad news, because if the surgery hasn’t worked, there’s a million other thi