Question: Pain seems very self explanatory, what advances in psychology give insight into pain that isnt common knowledge?

Alexandra Quigley answered on 4 Mar 2019:

People feel pain in their bodies, and so they think that pain starts in the body and is ‘transmitted’ to the brain, which ‘registers’ the pain. This isn’t how it works though.
A ‘change’ is registered in the cells and receptors in a particular body area. Messages are sent to the brain about that change. At this point, there is no pain.
The brain registers this message, and thousands of other messages are also sent to the brain, which processes them at superquick speed. So many different things can influence pain, not just what is happening in the body. Messages about what we can see, hear, smell, taste, remember, predict etc are all influential.
The brain generates the experience of pain based on MANY different inputs. Pain is a protective ‘response’, not an input. Pain isn’t only telling us about damage. If we can influence the inputs, we can influence the pain response.

There has been some really interesting research about pain done by Professor Lorimer Moseley. He works in Australia and he used to work at the University of Oxford. You should check out some of his youtube videos. This one is quite a good one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBlkhFRV53w