Last week Daedalus proposed to map the mental world of love. By scanning the brains of lovers of all types, and correlating their brain states with their verbal descriptions of them, he hoped to devise objective definitions of words such as 'desire', 'infatuation' and 'being in love', whose wild and inconsistent usage causes vast confusion between the sexes.
He is now generalizing this project. Nobody can truly know what anyone else is feeling. But brain-scan technology should at least allow us to draw consistent mental maps. For example, some medics now present patients with a long list of words for pain — dull, sharp, nagging, stabbing, burning, and so on — to find those words most often used for the pain of specific disorders. By noting which brain regions are activated by pains of a given description, and in what way, Daedalus hopes to draw an abstract 'pain map', scaled in character and intensity, and map on to it the most common verbal descriptions. The outcome should be a public vocabulary of private distress, verifiable by brain scanning, in which patients and doctors could at last speak clearly to each other.
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