Special Issue: The Body in Pain: A Re-engagement On Pain as a Distinct Sensation: Mapping Intensities, Affects, and Difference in ‘Interior States’ Mark Paterson University of Pittsburgh Abstract A recent widely reported study found that some participants would prefer to self- administer a small electric shock than be bored. This flawed study serves as a departure point to diagram pain and sensation beyond the boundaries of the individual body, consisting of four sections. First, in terms of laboratory-based experimentation and auto-experimentation with pain, there is a long history of viewing pain and touch through introspective means. Second, later theories of pain successively widened the scope of the physiological mechanisms and external influences on the organism, such as Melzack and Wall’s cybernetics-influenced gate control theory. Third, we briefly consider the nervous system as a homeostatic system, which finds an historical parallel in explanations of the milieu int´ erieur of the organism, via Claude Bernard and Kurt Goldstein. Fourth, pain helps tip the organism as a whole from perception to action, but also operates beyond the organism as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. Keywords history/critique, neuroscience, pain, physiology, psychophysics, Scarry ‘If I were to choose between pain and nothing, I would choose pain’, the protagonist in Faulkner’s Wild Palms muses (in Hardcastle, 1999: 121). 1 This was the choice apparently offered to participants in a notorious and widely reported social psychology study by a team from the Universities of Virginia and Harvard led by Tim Wilson, Corresponding author: Mark Paterson. Email: paterson@pitt.edu Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org 1–36 ª The Author(s) 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/1357034X19834631 journals.sagepub.com/home/bod Body & Society