Anne Minert

Pain and the evolutionary origins of subjective experience.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences November 3, 2025 Mark Baron, Anne Minert, Marshall Devor

The cerebral neocortex is essential for the complex feature extractions underlying sensory perception. Pain is an exception. Its adaptive message, fight or flee, is already available at the first central synapse. We propose that raw consciousness emerged with pain. Eons later the cortical supercomputer began providing complex computational output to the primeval circuitry of conscious pain...