All conscious experience, even pain, is “constructed”

Abstract

Although a constructivist view of consciousness is not an obvious one, consciousness theorists since William James have stressed the importance of selectivity and personal history for the creation of conscious experience. The conscious experience of pain is subject to the same processes. The nonlinear dynamic systems model approach introduced to the pain field by Chapman and Nakamura provides a promising overarching framework for multidisciplinary pain research, but does not directly deal with the problem of drawing strong inferences from functional brain imaging studies.