Pain Points with Max Shen

Max Shen

Are you a brain in a body, or a body with a brain? What does the nervous system have to do with chronic pain? How do we 'debug' pain? Join Max as he explores the relationship between pain and insight. Featuring scientists, pioneers in somatic therapy, and those who have recovered from chronic pain. Max Shen is a pain researcher affiliated with MIT. He is also the creator of Debug Your Pain, a platform to teach skills in pain resolution. A production of Debug Your Pain. Read our latest at essays.debugyourpain.com essays.debugyourpain.com

Episodes

  1. OCT 25

    Avi Grinberg on Pain as a Knife You Resist

    If there is a sharp knife pressing into my hand, and let’s call it pain, if I resist, resist it, and hate it and want it gone, I stick the knife deeper in my hand. Try to push it away, okay. Deeper. Now if I relax my hand, okay, it’s a totally different experience. Now, this is like the ABC of dealing with pain. Not focusing on the pain, but focusing what you do against the pain. Because the general attitude of people is pain is the enemy. Pain is bad. Pain is the devil. When people are experiencing pain, they immediately contract and stop breathing. Those two actions push the knife more into the body because you take away the respiration, the person doesn’t breathe, or his body doesn’t have enough energy to deal with the pain. He contracts muscles, he blocks the energy flow in the body. Now the pain can only accumulate.”  My guest today, Avi Grinberg, is a deep practitioner. He started out as a paramedic and traveled around the world to learn from different indigenous heals. I was particularly excited to talk to Avi because, in my own journey of exploring pain, I’ve come to a set of intuitions that’s hard to articulate about the role of awareness and how we generate the pain in our own way. When I saw Avi speak, I felt there was a deep connection that we were coming from the same place and seeing things, and so naturally I reached out to have a conversation. While I might not agree with all of Avi’s conclusions. I found a lot to learn from him in this conversation and I hope you will too. 00:00:00 Introduction and Early Encounters with Healing 00:04:00 “Most People Don’t Know How to Experience Pain” 00:08:00 Pain Is Energy Seeking Completion 00:12:00 Indigenous Healers in the Middle East and South America 00:36:00 Demonstration of the Exercise: Relaxing Into Pain 00:44:00 Trying Hard Breeds Chronic Tension 01:04:00 The Danger of “Easy Healing” 01:17:00 Closing Reflections Grinberg method website http://www.grinbergmethod.com/ YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@GrinbergMethod This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    1h 20m

  2. SEP 12

    David Chapman on Debugging Illness and Health

    In this episode of Pain Points, I’m speaking with David Chapman, a writer and thinker whose work on meaning, meta-rationality, and science has been the most important education I received outside of MIT. David was a prominent AI researcher in the late 1980s and later a startup founder, but for decades he has written deeply about philosophy, systems, and what he calls “meta-rationality.” In this conversation, we explore how that lens applies to healthcare and chronic illness. David shares his own story of navigating years of debilitating fatigue and food intolerance, how the medical system failed him, and the experiment he devised that restored his health. He also describes his experience with long COVID, and how a six-mile run cured his fatigue. We also discuss: why debugging is inherently meta-rational, how most medical science may be false, and why bright lights—not antidepressants—end up curing decades of seasonal depression. “I could barely stand up. So I drove myself to the trailhead, ran six miles, and by the end…the fatigue was gone.” “Popper spent his life trying to solve the question: what separates science from non-science? He failed. Everyone has failed.” Episode Outline [00:00 – 08:00] Meta-Rationality and Debugging * Rationality vs. reasonableness vs. meta-rationality * Debugging as paradigmatic example of meta-rational thinking * Chronic illness is necessarily metarational [08:00 – 14:00] Failures of the American Healthcare System * Patchwork of semi-systems that don’t communicate * Anecdotes of bureaucratic breakdown (insurance snafus, mis-sent faxes) * Emergence of the communal mode: relying on personal networks instead of systems [14:00 – 19:00] Medical Interventions and Their Limits * Treatments are often presented as “fixes,” but the body still does the healing [24:00 – 33:00] Fatigue, Food Intolerance, and Experimentation * Years of symptoms: fatigue, brain fog, GI distress * Multiple doctors, useless tests, failed elimination diets * Breakthrough: reducing diet to three foods, symptoms vanish in a week [47:00 – 49:00] Mislearned Associations * Pesto and cheesecake stories as examples of the body “wrongly” learning aversions [53:00 – 59:00] Long COVID and the Six-Mile Cure * Fatigue relapse after a hike * Experiment: pushing through with a six-mile run [60:00 – 72:00] Somatic Practices and Newtonian Mechanics * Alexander Technique and Feldenkrais as non-woo somatic methods * Health as alignment, awareness, and agency [74:00 – 79:00] The Demarcation Problem and Medical Science * Why the line between science and non-science can’t be drawn * Why most medical research may be false [87:00 – 92:00] Bright Light Therapy and Seasonal Depression * Curing decades of winter depression * How breakthroughs often come from outside the medical system [92:00 – End] Closing Reflections * Health as agency and experimentation * The need for communities that avoid both scientism and woo * Restoring agency to people dealing with chronic illness Links * You can find David’s writing at meaningness.substack.com Thanks for reading Debug Your Pain! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    1h 47m

  3. AUG 11

    Jozef Frucek on Active Inference, Tai Chi, and the Future of Health

    In this episode of Pain Points, I’m speaking with Jozef Frucek, a dear mentor of mine and a pioneer in the world of movement. He uses embodied cognition to combine ideas from Tai Chi, wrestling, and physical theater to create a wholly unique approach to movement that he calls the Fighting Monkey Practice. We recently finished a paper called Beyond Biomechanics, Fighting Monkey and the Enactive Inference Approach to Health and Movement. I'm really excited about this interview today because Jozef is, as you'll hear, an incredible storyteller. But more importantly, through his work he is articulating one of the most inspiring visions of health, which of course relates to my own work on pain. We begin by discussing his background, learning Tai Chi for 20 years in an experimental slovakian movement community before explicitly discussing our paper. (You can read the transcript online) “ Health is not absence of illness. Health may be described as your capacity to be connected to people . That's also being healthy, right? That's very important. I think we are too obsessed by staying healthy, trying to do everything right. We force our bodies and we stress our bodies enormously. We constantly follow some sort of protocol. We are constantly hearing what we should be, what exercise we should be doing, but we really forget how to listen to ourselves. We rarely find our authentic voice. We only follow ideas of others, but we do not sense what actually is happening in our physiology.” [00:00:00 - 08:00] Origins and Early Movement Journey * Transition from basketball to acting * Discovery of movement community in Slovakia * Meeting Tai Chi masters and the 20-year journey with Ming Wong [08:00 - 14:00] Philosophy of Teaching and Permission * The importance of teacher permission vs. open learning * "Stray dogs" approach to students * Evolution doesn't create solutions, it creates problem-solving [14:00 - 22:00] Theater, Sports, and Asian Philosophy * How Tai Chi informed theatrical practice * Table tennis and father-son relationship * Journey through Taoism, Zen Buddhism, and Korean traditions [22:00 - 33:00] Existential Pain and Storytelling * Childhood encounters with mortality and darkness * Theater as simulation and agency creation * "I have something and I'm afraid of losing it" - the core of suffering [33:00 - 45:00] The Question Dance * Interactive dialogue experiment * Exploring meaning, perception, and embodied understanding * The power of questions over answers [45:00 - 58:00] Scientific Philosophy and Embodied Practice * Active inference and nested agency * Extended mind and embedded cognition * Breathing as autonomous intelligence [58:00 - End] Health, Agency, and Creative Healing * Health as agency rather than absence of disease * Joy and pleasure as guides to healing * The vision for more accessible creative movement practice Links Shen, Max, and Jozef Frucek. "Beyond Biomechanics: Fighting Monkey and the Enactive Inference Approach to Health and Movement." (2025). Link Fighting Monkey website, IG About the Host Max Shen is a former machine learning researcher turned pain and cognition researcher. After facing chronic pain in grad school, he now uses computational tools at MIT to explore pain from a systems and somatic lens. 🎧 Listen to all episodes: * Substack: essays.debugyourpain.com 📬 Get in touch: * Email: maxkshen@gmail.com * Twitter: @maxkshen This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    1h 20m
  4. Michael Levin on Pain as Agent, Healing as Alignment

    JUL 29

    Michael Levin on Pain as Agent, Healing as Alignment

    “ We try to think about things from the perspective of the state itself. We too are a temporary metabolic pattern, and we have we have mental states and memories and goals and preferences and thoughts and so on. I think of all of these things as a continuum, [William James] said that ‘thoughts are thinkers too’, and it's a spectrum. We are also patterns, and we spawn off other patterns and there's a continuum... there’re fleeting thoughts and then persistent, intrusive thoughts that are a little harder to get rid of. Maybe they do a little niche construction in your nervous system to keep themselves around longer. And then, much larger things like personality fragments, like in dissociative identity disorder, and then full human personalities, and then maybe some sort of transpersonal bigger things after that.”  Professor Michael Levin is the director of the Allen Discovery Institute at Tufts, and in my opinion, the most interesting scientist alive. He's created devices to regenerate limbs in animals that are non regenerative, made tadpoles grow working eyeballs out of their tails, and created other novel self-healing microscale life forms. I am joined also by Adam Safron, who is a brilliant postdoc-collaborator with Mike Levin and who is a good friend of mine. I start with a concise overview of Levin’s work and we get into rich territory about pain. I hope you enjoy the interview as much as I did. More on health, movement, and becoming the whole collective intelligence you are: essays.debugyourpain.com You can also listen on Apple Podcasts Timestamps 00:00:00 – Regeneration, Bioelectricity, and Cellular AgencyLevin introduces frog limb regeneration and the surprising effects of an empty biodome—suggesting even cells can experience agency and respond to protected environments. 00:02:00 – The TAME Framework: Every Living System as Nested IntelligenceMax explains Michael Levin’s worldview: living organisms are composed of goal-directed agents across scales, from organs to organelles. 00:06:00 – Chronic Pain as a Persistent Pattern with AgencyExploring the provocative idea that pain can act as an agent with its own goals—akin to false beliefs that persist within tissue systems. 00:09:00 – Personal Narrative: Reorienting Research Through PainMax shares his journey through unexplained chronic pain, and how it led to a shift toward somatic cognition and predictive processing. 00:13:00 – Patterns as Thinkers: From Thoughts to Dissociative AgentsLevin discusses how persistent cognitive patterns—like chronic pain or trauma—may act as semi-autonomous agents within the system. 00:18:00 – Social Contagion, Morphogenetic Cohesion, and Cellular BeliefHow embryonic cells reinforce each other’s development plans, resist defects together, and what this implies for physiological and social healing. 00:21:00 – Messaging the Collective: Bioelectric Signals and Organ-Level IntelligenceDiscussion of how regenerative signals work at the tissue or organ level, rather than with individual cells—emphasizing the importance of scale in intervention. 00:27:00 – Rethinking Pain: Language, Valence, and Non-Neural EmbodimentsChallenging assumptions that affect or pain require a nervous system—suggesting even transcriptional states can have “preferences.” 00:34:00 – Therapeutic Alliance and Molecular PlacebosExploring the parallels between psychotherapy, placebo effects, and associative learning in gene regulatory networks. 00:40:00 – High-Level Healing: Letting Systems Solve Their Own ProblemsHow interventions like biodomes or somatic practices (e.g., Feldenkrais) can empower cellular or bodily systems to rejoin the collective intelligence of the organism. Resources Levin, Michael. "A Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere: an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds." Frontiers in systems neuroscience 16 (2022): 768201. “Beyond Biomechanics: The Enactive Inference Approach to Health and Movement” Shen & Frucek (2025) Contact * Email: max@debugyourpain.com * Twitter: @mxslk This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    54 min
  5. Bren Veziroglu on Teaching Tasks, Not Techniques

    JUL 3

    Bren Veziroglu on Teaching Tasks, Not Techniques

    Bren’s documentary is out! Watch here More on health, movement, and becoming the whole collective intelligence you are at essays.debugyourpain.com 00:00:00 Introduction — Movement Without Reductionism 00:01:00 From Stanford Biochemistry to Movement Coaching 00:03:00 Traditional Training: Isolate, Integrate, Improvise 00:06:00 Why Transfer Fails in Traditional Models 00:09:00 Ecological Dynamics in Combat Sports 00:18:00 Constraints-Led Approach and Skill Transfer 00:21:00 Enactivism vs. Ecological Dynamics 00:26:00 The Role of Intention and Meaning in Movement 00:31:00 What is Beautiful Movement? 00:35:00 Movement and Evolutionary Mismatch 00:41:00 Nested Agency and Biological Intelligence 00:47:00 Rehabilitating Without Rest: A Proactive View on Pain 00:56:00 Changing Paradigms in BJJ and Movement Instruction 01:01:00 Teaching With Tasks, Not Moves 01:07:00 From Theory to Practice: Bringing CLA to New Disciplines 01:12:00 Workshops, Collaborations, and What’s Next Beyond Biomechanics: The Enactive Inference Approach to Health and Movement – Shen & Frucek Ramstead, M., et al. “A tale of two densities: Active inference is enactive inference.” Adaptive Behavior, 2019. Varela, F., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind. MIT Press, 2016. Lehman, G. “Recovery Strategies.” Greg Lehman’s Website Fighting Monkey Practice: fightingmonkey.net Bren Veziroglu studied biochemistry at Stanford and worked in molecular imaging before pivoting to the world of movement and rehabilitation. He now teaches and practices using the constraints-led approach, integrating ecological dynamics, somatics, and martial arts to train human beings — not just athletes. Max Shen is a former machine learning researcher turned pain and cognition scientist. After facing chronic pain in grad school, he now uses computational tools at MIT to explore pain from a systems and somatic lens. 🎧 Listen to all episodes: Substack: debugyourpain.com Get in touch: Email: maxkshen@gmail.com Twitter: @mxslk This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    1h 15m
  6. A Paradigm Change in Biology

    JUN 21

    A Paradigm Change in Biology

    essays.debugyourpain.com ## Timestamps 00:00:00 Introduction - The Coming Paradigm Change in Biology   00:02:00 The Biomedical Paradigm: Materialism, Reductionism, and Dualism   00:05:00 How Pain Is Usually Explained (And Why It's Wrong)   00:07:00 Problems with Materialism, Reductionism, Dualism 00:12:00 Pain Without Damage, Damage Without Pain   00:15:00 The Alternative: Biological Computation and Collective Intelligence.  00:26:00 Health as Problem-Solving Ability, Not Statistical Norms   00:30:00 Pain as a Control Signal and Skill   00:32:00 The Somatic Scientists - Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, FM Alexander   00:37:00 Why RCTs Don't Work for Complex Therapies   00:42:00 Bridging Science and Practice  ## Key Figures Mentioned - **Michael Levin** (Tufts) - Biological computation and collective intelligence - **Karl Friston** (University College London) - Active inference and free energy principle - **Dennis Noble** (Oxford) - Biological relativity and heart pacemaker cells - **Ida Rolf** - Developed Rolfing, emphasized fascia connections - **Moshe Feldenkrais** - Physicist turned movement therapist - **FM Alexander** - Alexander Technique founder Resources - Ashar, Yoni K., et al. "Effect of pain reprocessing therapy vs placebo and usual care for patients with chronic back pain: a randomized clinical trial." JAMA psychiatry 79.1 (2022): 13-23. - Noble, Denis. "A theory of biological relativity: no privileged level of causation." Interface focus 2.1 (2012): 55-64. - Wampold, Bruce E., and Zac E. Imel. The great psychotherapy debate: The evidence for what makes psychotherapy work. Routledge, 2015. - Beyond Biomechanics: The Enactive Inference Approach to Health and Movement: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/uqcs4_v1 About the Host Max is a former machine learning researcher who pivoted to studying pain and cognition after experiencing chronic pain during graduate school. He now uses computational tools to study chronic pain at MIT. --- - Substack: debugyourpain.substack.com **Get in touch:** - Email: maxkshen@gmail.com - Twitter: @mxslk - Substack: debugyourpain.substack.com This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    38 min
  7. Do we learn tension?

    APR 5

    Do we learn tension?

    This is a 15-minute excerpt from a conversation I had with Chris Lakin A few quotes: Oftentimes people learn to do some self-loathing thing. And the consequence of that is you make yourself smaller either physically or you just do less things. People see you less often and see you as less of a threat. And then you get into fewer conflicts with them. And if you are optimizing for having as few conflicts as possible, not necessarily living the best life, then that makes a whole lot of sense. When you were attracted to a thing or are in the default positive state, you are aiming at the thing that you want. whereas when people are in the negative attractor or they're really pessimistic — and you especially see this around the most doom-y AI people — they are aiming at a thing that they don't want. You're running away from something, but there's no direction towards. You can't coordinate on that. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit essays.debugyourpain.com

    15 min
  • 7 Episodes

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Are you a brain in a body, or a body with a brain? What does the nervous system have to do with chronic pain? How do we 'debug' pain? Join Max as he explores the relationship between pain and insight. Featuring scientists, pioneers in somatic therapy, and those who have recovered from chronic pain. Max Shen is a pain researcher affiliated with MIT. He is also the creator of Debug Your Pain, a platform to teach skills in pain resolution. A production of Debug Your Pain. Read our latest at essays.debugyourpain.com essays.debugyourpain.com

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