Reading a mind in pain

Editor’s note: This article is
by Dr. Guillermo Cecchi of IBM Research’s Computational Biology Group. 



Pain, whether dealing with a healthy or sick person, is an
enormous part of medicine. Yet it is poorly understood. Consider this: we are
often asked to rate our perception of pain intensity, by reporting it in a
scale between 1 and 10. In this way, pain can be measurable. However, pain is