Pain asymbolia, also called pain dissociation, is a condition in which pain

Pain

Pain is an unpleasant sensation often caused by intense or damaging stimuli such as stubbing a toe, burning a finger, putting iodine on a cut, and bumping the "funny bone."...

 is perceived, but does not cause suffering

Suffering

Suffering, or pain in a broad sense, is an individual's basic affective experience of unpleasantness and aversion associated with harm or threat of harm. Suffering may be qualified as physical or mental. It may come in all degrees of intensity, from mild to intolerable. Factors of duration and...

. This usually results from injury to the brain, lobotomy

Lobotomy

Lobotomy "; τομή – tomē: "cut/slice") is a neurosurgical procedure, a form of psychosurgery, also known as a leukotomy or leucotomy . It consists of cutting the connections to and from the prefrontal cortex, the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain...

, cingulotomy or morphine analgesia. Preexisting lesions of the insula may abolish the aversive quality of painful stimuli while preserving the location and intensity aspects. Typically, patients report that they have pain but are not bothered by it, they recognize the sensation of pain but are mostly or completely immune to suffering from it.

Insofar as it shows that pain may be experienced as a sensation devoid of any unpleasantness, pain asymbolia poses a direct challenge to the classical definition of pain proposed by the International Association for the Study of Pain.