Objectively measuring physical pain has been impossible. Doctors have relied on a patient’s self-report. And when asked to compensate accident victims for pain and suffering, so have juries.

But all that may soon change. Recently Stanford University researchers have used brain images and computer technology to assess pain.  In this study, a computer

Array tomography is a state-of-the-art imaging system invented by Stanford University researchers. It allows researchers to count the myriad connections between nerve cells, as well as to catalog those connections’ surprising variety.

A typical healthy human brain contains about 200 billion nerve cells, or neurons, linked to one another via hundreds of trillions of tiny

An impact on one side of the head can cause the pudding-like substance of the brain to hit the inside of the skull and then bounce back and hit the inside of the skull on the opposite side of the head.  When the brain suffers two injuries from one impact, it is called a