tracks acute pain or pain coming up from the body and this type of pain in particular is very consistent across individual people. so we can actually develop a brain signature that can track how much pain, this kind of pain an individual is feeling. jenna: so instead of pain being something that s subjective, eventually doctors would be able to objectively say this is the pain, this is how intense your pain is? that s the hope and pain is very real in the brain but it is also very hard to empathize with pain in other people because we can t touch their pain, we can t feel their pain and pain is also very hard to measure because people use language in very different ways and people from different cultures. so the hope this can give us a way of looking at the brain directly and understanding some of the neurophysiological ingredients that underlie pain and therefore, understand how we can more effectively treat pain. jenna: it is so interesting you say that i was in the doctor s office