Well, you may soon feel others' pain, thanks to scientists who have discovered what they claim is a way to measure a person's suffering.
Using brain scans, a team at the Oxford University has carried out a series of studies which have shown distinct differences between the brains of people in pain and others who are not.
"Pain seems to increase the blood flow to certain parts of the brain roughly in proportion to the amount of pain felt, and we can measure that activation in a brain scan," the team's leader Prof Irene Tracey said.
What the scientists have found is that the brain possesses what they call a "pain matrix", with such feelings typically activating more than a dozen parts of the brain, 'The Sunday Times' reported.
This is in contrast to other senses such as vision or hearing, where stimuli are generally fed to just one part of the brain for interpretation.
In fact, according to the scientists, such findings suggest that pain could one day be measured objectively, a change that would have widespread legal as well as social implications.
In accident compensation cases, for example, lawyers might be able to order reports on just how much pain a victim was suffering. Doctors might also be able to monitor the exact benefits of drug regimes and treatments.
Tracey said the aim was to build a generalised model of how pain activated the brain, collated from scans of many different people. And, then individuals suffering chronic pain could be compared with the model to give a measure of the type and level of pain they were in.
