PAIN intensity, the most personal of experiences, can now be measured from the outside, say researchers who scanned the brains of young men who were fresh out of the operating theatre.
Their claim reopens the debate over whether pain can be measured objectively. It might even be possible to gauge the pain felt by newborn babies, fetuses, “locked-in” patients, who can’t communicate with the outside world, and animals.
“The definition of pain is that it is subjective, and until now an objective measurement has remained elusive,” says of the University of Oxford, who has previously worked on…
