The story of this book goes back 15 enthusiastic years. At the end of 1991, S.C., at the time 26, was asked by C.A. Pagni, one of the past mavens of the field, to take up central pain. S.C. was back from a semester as an intern at Lyon (France) neurosurgical hospital. A dedicated bookworm, he often skipped the operating theater in favor of the local well-stocked library. In that year a paper was published by two US neurobiologists, espousing the idea of consciousness arising from corticothalamic reverberation: this paper drew his attention, as he was entertaining a different opinion as to how consciousness arises. At the beginning of 1992 he came across a paper written by two US neurologists, describing a case of central post-stroke pain abolished by a further stroke: the authors were at a loss to explain the reason.

Discoveries sometimes happen when two apparently distant facts suddenly fit together to explain a previously puzzling observation. And so it was. During a “girl-hunting” bike trip at Turin's best-known park, a sunny springtime afternoon, the realization came thundering in. Within a short time, a name was found and so the dynamic reverberation theory of central pain was born. It was first announced in a paper published in the February 1993 issue of Neurosurgery and then in Medical Hypotheses in 1994.