When Pain Learns to Think: How the brain creates chronic suffering and what opportunities this opens

Chronic pain is one of the most common and mysterious health problems of our time. Millions of people suffer from it-often despite clear diagnoses, successful surgery, or intensive drug therapy. Conventional medicine has reached its limits here. But new scientific findings show that pain is not a simple warning signal, but an active, interpretive process of the brain.
This book presents a radically new understanding of pain-well-founded, understandable, and practical. It explains how the brain predicts, intensifies, or resolves pain, what role attention, expectations, and previous experiences play, and why freedom from pain is not always the only sensible goal.
At the same time, it shows how modern forms of therapy-such as pain reprocessing therapy, pain education, body-oriented methods, and neurocognitive training-are opening up new ways of dealing with chronic pain. Not by simply suppressing it, but by understanding, relearning, and activating inner resources.
A book for anyone who lives with pain, treats it, or wants to understand it better-and for a form of medicine that puts people back at the center.
Bremen University Press has published over 4,800 specialist books in various languages since 2005.
1st edition 2025