Michael Levin on Pain as Agent, Healing as Alignment

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Jul 29, 2025

Michael Levin, director of the Allen Discovery Institute at Tufts, is a pioneer in regeneration and bioelectricity. He delves into the concept of agency in living organisms, revealing how chronic pain can act as an agent impacting physiology and psychology. The power of social contagion in health behaviors highlights how collective influences shape healing. Levin challenges conventional notions of pain, suggesting it may exist at molecular levels, while discussing innovative approaches to regenerative medicine and the fusion of AI with health intelligence.

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INSIGHT

Persistent Patterns Can Act Like Agents

Persistent patterns (like chronic pain) can be treated as agents with goals that act to preserve themselves.
Levin argues this view helps reinterpret disorders like cancer as cellular dissociation from the organism's collective goal.

ANECDOTE

Personal Recovery Via Interoception

Max described his own hand pain that arose while doing cognitive research and resolved via interoceptive work.
He credits sensing and exploring memories for resolving the condition and shifting priors.

INSIGHT

Excitable Media Beyond Neurons Hold Patterns

Levin treats persistent physiological states as agents distinct from physical structures of cells and tissues.
He proposes excitable media beyond neurons store and process patterns relevant to morphogenesis and pain.

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“ 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