Have you ever stubbed your toe on your bed, hit your funny bone at your desk, or burnt your tongue on hot soup? Not exactly a pleasant feeling—quite painful. Still, it is indisputable that pain is something we need to survive. Sharp, acute pain serves as an alarm system and warns us against threats to our bodies. Chronic pain, on the other hand, has lost its protective function and exists well after the acute threat to the body has disappeared. Although we know that pain originates in the brain, we know surprisingly little about its mechanisms. Can we develop a way to accurately determine how much pain a patient feels to be able to help them better?

About Laura Bok

Laura Bok, pain researcher at PainLabMunich, is fascinated by the human perception of pain. Most notably, Laura is on a mission to uncover the brain’s mechanisms surrounding the subjective nature of pain perception—in other words, why we don’t always feel pain in the same way. As a neuroscientist and pain researcher, Laura's thoughts revolve around pain in the human brain – a lot. After graduating in Psychology from the Ruhr-University Bochum, Laura completed her Ph.D. at the Technical University of Munich and continued her work in the PainLabMunich as a PostDoc. Laura also works at TUM’s university hospital Klinikum Rechts der Isar to conduct neuropsychological evaluations and has recently finished her training as a behavioral therapist.