‘Premature babies can feel pain, scans show’. So reads a headline in the daily newspaper[1]. Has pain at last been registered on a machine? Looking at the details of the article, I find that the facts are not quite as the headline implied. What the scans showed was that during blood tests on premature babies surges of blood and oxygen in the sensory areas of their brains were detected. But then the article adds – ‘demonstrating that pain was being processed’.
The article implies that this evidence is a breakthrough because it is quite distinct from previous evidence concerning premature babies. That evidence was about behaviour. Scientists had observed behaviour signs of pain before, such as reflex movement, but it was always a possibility that there was ‘pain behaviour’ without pain actually being experienced. The brain events now observed, however, are presented as giving proof of a quite different order, or so it seems.
Why do the scientists (or at least the reporters) believe that pain has been detected? There is a part of the brain called the somatosensory cortex. It processes data from the body’s surface and, the article says, ‘is known to be linked to feelings of pain in adults’. That can only mean that the reports of some adults who, unlike premature babies, are able to tell others in words when they are in pain, have been correlated with surges of blood and oxygen in that part of the brain. So we know that when a volunteer feels pain, a particular type of brain event is occurring.
It may be that these findings lead to a practical effect, that more thought will be given to the consequences of procedures on premature babies which now seem to cause pain.
But the assumption in the article needs to be challenged. The impression is given that a conscious state had at last been included in a measuring process, that pain itself, not a change in the brain, had moved a dial or appeared on a screen when what was reported was a practical not a metaphysical breakthrough. A type of brain event that regularly correlates with a type of conscious event was identified for the first time in premature babies.
It may change the way premature babies are treated but it tells us nothing new about consciousness.
Is there any way that consciousness might be scientifically measure or recorded? Think of all the measuring devices that exist. Take into account all the advances, the new technologies far beyond what is possible at present.
[1] The Daily Telegraph (5.4.06)
Consciousness and Other Matters 