You know that moment when you stub your toe and it hurts way more than it should? Like, you’ve walked into the corner of the couch before—many times, in fact—but this time you yelp like you’ve been shot in a spaghetti western and want to punch someone innocent in the face?

That’s not because the couch has developed new, sharper corners. That’s because pain is weird.

And more importantly, it’s not fixed. It’s not math. It’s not “this much injury = this much agony.” No. Pain is cooked up like a bizarre soup in your brain—seasoned with your mood, your hormones, your expectations, how hungry you are, whether Mercury is in retrograde, and whether or not you could get your printer to work this morning. It’s...bespoke.

This is something I learned from science journalist Leigh Cowart, author of the magnificent and slightly terrifying book Hurts So Good: The Science and Culture of Pain on Purpose. I interviewed them on my podcast Fifty Words for Snow, where we normally go galloping around the globe gathering untranslatable words like linguistic magpies. But on this episode, The Pain Episode, instead of digging into Inuit or Sanskrit, we went spelunking into the language of pain science—and it turns out pain has its own secret vocabulary, its own private culture, and, yes, its own plot twists.

And one of those plot twists? You like pain more than you think.

I thought this idea was fascinating: “There’s really no one-to-one stimulus-to-output pain system,” Cowart told me. “Your brain is cooking it up fresh every single time.”

Fresh. Every. Time. That’s right. Your brain is a sadist, tailoring each twinge and throb to your personal........

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