Decoding pain

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Drawing on her own experience, Marlene Berke is designing computational models that help clinicians better assess pain in their patients.

As an undergradute at Cornell University, Berke had the opportunity to design her own major. Captivated by how computational scientists were using models to understand how people think through complex problems, she chose to study computational cognitive science. She devoured journal articles and sought out courses that would prepare her for graduate studies, and she went on to earn a PhD in cognitive psychology at Yale, where she used modeling to explore how people think about other people’s thoughts.

At the same time, Berke was dealing with chronic pain. Just as frustrating as her condition was the skepticism that she faced when she sought care. “Health care providers did not believe or take seriously the pain that I would describe,” she says. And she knew her experience was not unique.

“As I was trying to get care for this condition and convince doctors that this mattered, I realized that these were high-stakes social interactions — not only for me but for a lot of people,” Berke says. She recognized that computational cognitive science might explain those interactions and even improve them.

Now a postdoctoral fellow in the K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center at MIT working with mentors Rebecca Saxe and Josh Tenenbaum, Berke is leveraging computational models to explore how people make judgments about the pain other people are experiencing. Without experiencing that pain ourselves, we have to make inferences, weighing what the person tells us alongside medical evidence and observation. “That can be a tricky problem,” Berke says. And, she acknowledges, clinicians usually don’t have much time to figure it out.

“I think it’s a very important problem, and this type of modeling is a natural fit for understanding how people do this,” Berke says. Currently, she is exploring how people without medical training perceive pain in others, and how this changes with varying levels of education. She hopes what she learns can be used to develop better strategies and tools to improve clinicians’ ability to assess pain in their patients.

Berke no longer has chronic pain; her condition was finally diagnosed and successfully treated. But it took eight years, and she’s furious about that. Her experience prompted her to start a chapter of Tight Lipped, an advocacy organization that improves clinician training about gynecological pain conditions, while she was at Yale. She is continuing that work in the Boston area.