Rough words from Neruda
I have been lucky enough to wander around Pablo Neruda’s house in Valparaiso, Chile. My host gave me “I Explain a Few Things” which is a…
Cars, trucks, buses and metaphor
Cars and trucks In 2010 Steve Jobs, the late founder of Apple, likened iPads to cars and personal computers to trucks. Cars are smaller, more nimble,…
The self-lubricating animal story
One of our most popular blogs in 2015 was “We Are Self-Lubricating Animals”, which is now Neuroscience Nugget #49 in Explain Pain Supercharged. While reading…
The anaphoric clinician
The best Explain Pain messages are memorable, persuasive, easily retrievable and behaviour changing. Repetition is one of the most powerful rhetorical skills but of course you…
Wear and tear – I rhyme every time
We all want our Explain Pain stories to be sticky, memorable and useful for our learners. There are many techniques that allow this, but one forgotten and…
Duckrabbit
Philosopher Sandy Grant in Aeon on Wittgenstein and his language-games: How playing Wittgensteinian language-games can set us free We live out our lives amid a world of…
Stressed Unstressed
I have always loved Rudyard Kipling’s uplifting poem ‘If’ – it’s too long to repeat here, but easily available. Just a few lines … “If…
Can a word that’s profane help with pain?
As a child, swearing is up the top of the list of things we’re taught not to do. You may have lost hard-earned pocket money to…
The power of your words
“Bamboo spine” A few years ago my housemate started to experience back pain. It came about after a stomach infection in Thailand, and continued to trouble her…
Lost in Translation – Crustaceans grill Pfizer
New Scientist published a research article in February about whether invertebrates feel pain, and I for one would like to congratulate them on publishing a non-sensationalist article…
