 A natural explanation that a perceptual theorist might give is that unlike other perceptual modalities, the acts of sensing tissue damage involved in feeling pain (i.e., the experience) have a very pronounced negative affective quality: pains are unpleasant, awful, hurtful, painful (see Pitcher 1970, p. 379ff; and Armstrong 1962, p. 125ff; 1968, p. 310ff). It is this negative affect that explains why we are fixated on the experience itself, rather than what it is a perception of, i.e., traumatized body parts. In other words, it is this negative quality that turns the recognitional focus onto itself, and with it, onto the experience it attaches to. If this is correct, then, of course, pains are equally unpleasant even when they misrepresent. This is why we pick out our acts of sensing (i.e., the experiences themselves) rather than their external objects irrespective of their informational etiology: whether or not they are veridical, they equally hurt.