 In his paper, Dennett primarily relies on the kind of dissociation involved in lobotomy and morphine cases and treats them as if they involved the same kind of strong dissociation involved in pain asymbolia. He also presents certain aspects of the gate-control theory of pain transmission developed by Melzack and Wall which had already started to revolutionize the scientific pain research (Melzack and Wall 1965; Melzack 1973). Inspired by this theory, he then presents a speculative subpersonal functional theory of pain processing, according to which pain processing occurs in many functionally (even anatomically) different components of the central nervous system, mostly in parallel, such that some of them can be selectively impaired. This kind of selective impairment, he says, can produce not only dissociation of the kind we are familiar with, but many more bizarre phenomena we can expect to find and imagine happening. His insight is that our ordinary notion of pain with its essentialist intuitions cannot withstand the implications of such scientific developments in pain research.