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Lesson 15
Topic: PAIN
1. Read and translate the text.
Pain
Pain is a vital part of our body’s defenses and an essential surviv-
al mechanism, for it warns us that something is wrong. Pain warns us
what things are dangerous, and so helps us avoid damage to our body.
If the body is already damaged, it helps with healing because it makes
us protect our injuries. Pain has an emotional component and is not
the same for everyone, which makes it notoriously difficult to measure
and compare. Tolerance of pain is influenced by genes, culture, condi-
tioning, and education.
Children, for example, have a greater sensitivity to pain than
adults, but some babies are born with a rare condition that makes them
unable to feel pain. They don’t learn the lessons that pain teachers,
and as a result suffer many fractures and infections. As for adults de-
spite the common view to the contrary, many studies show that men
have a higher pain threshold than women.
While the idea that the brain was the seat of perceptions had been
promoted by a few philosophers and physicians, such as Pythagoras,
Anaxagoras, and Galen in antiquity, or Avicenna (980–1037) and Al-
bertus Magnus (1193–1280) in the middle ages, it did not replace Ar-
istotle’s postulate of the heart being the centre for sensations and emo-
tions until the Renaissance. This transition allowed pain to become a
subject of interest for scientists investigating the brain.
Illustrations by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Andreas Ve-
salius (1514–1564), based on systematic studies of autopsies, repre-
sented these novel ideas on brain function in great detail. According to
da Vinci, the mind had its seat in the third ventricle of the brain, which
was reached by sensations from the body and from the special sensory
organs via the nerves and the spinal cord, represented in the form of
tubes. In a drawing of a man with two bodies and two heads, Leonar-
do presented an allegory of pain and pleasure as a unitary concept of
polar opposites, according to classical ideas described by Plato. In