Pain, like noise, is one of those vague nouns that reduces a vast array of sensations to a single, dull concept.

Today, I’ve been wishing that a particular collection of excruciating jaw pains were more of a concept and less of a sensation. It’s occurred to me, though, that the concept of pain—all our thinking about it—actually makes the pain worse.

Our brains are much stranger, more irrational contraptions than we make them out to be. We are actually awful at explaining why our minds work the way they do, and when we try to explain we tend to make things up out of nowhere.

There are a handful of people who, for one reason or another, are missing the connection between the two hemispheres of their brains. This means that one half of the brain can know things that the other doesn’t. If you tell one of these people to get up and walk around, but only communicate it to one side of the brain (for example, by showing a message that is visible only to one eye), the person will go ahead and get up—but one half of the brain will have no idea why.

Now, if you ask the other side of the brain “Why did you get up?” you would think the person would say “I don’t know.”

Not so. The brain will actually make up an explanation out of nowhere, and respond with something like “I wanted to get some coffee.”

So, in a nutshell, we’re programmed to explain ourselves. Our brains will fabricate explanations rather than admit not knowing why they did something.

In our hyper-explanatory culture, any sensation that enters our consciousness is subjected to a sort of customs interrogation at the border. Thoughts, feelings, sensations must all present ID at the perimeter of our minds or they are barred from entry. A whole lot of diverse sensory impressions get stamped as “pain” and therefore “bad.” This is really very convenient, since it saves our perpetually distracted minds from the effort to perceive (literally, “grasp with the mind”) anything unfamiliar. (While we’re on the etymology kick, it’s worth noting that “explain” comes from the Latin ex- planus, “flatten out.” Think “plain,” like an open field.)

If you actually reach into some of these sensations and rummage around a bit, sometimes you find that they aren’t so bad. Sometimes you find that they ARE so bad, in a specific way that you hadn’t noticed—the earache is actually a neck pain, or the back pain is from your worn-out leg muscles. Either way, you notice things you can’t get just by thinking.