If someone was able to cut open your skull and carefully touch your brain, would you be able to actually feel it? Obviously the brain has loads of nerves, but are they the kind that allow pain and/or touch sensation?
As a matter of fact…as I remember, the brain itself can’t sense touch or pain like that.
The tissues around the brain (like the Dura) and veins and blood vessels inside the brain, however, can feel pain. (IIRC)
Seems like you’d definitely feel the cutting-open-your-skull part.
Ever see Hannibal?
There are very few sensory neurons in the brain itself. Brain surgery does not produce tactile sensations of the brain itself, but it does produce responses like uncontrollable laughter, pleasurable smells of food, sexual arousal, prickling sensations in the limbs, and sudden recall of distant memories. It depends on what part of the brain is being manipulated.
Beetlejuice in the house!
You’re not supposed to play with it. Now put it back! Indeed, the brain is in a sealed box for a reason. Its fragile and its busy, so don’t go in there. 
Do a search on trepanning. I am eating lunch, so I cant.
IIRC they keep patients conscious (albeit a bit doped up) during brain surgery because: A) it is not actually painful to the patient as the brain does not feel pain itself and B) they want the patient talking to them as they poke around to get an idea of the more immediate effects of the surgery to try and avoid damaging some of the more important bits as they muck about in there (for instance if the patient all of a sudden says they cannot see the doctors back off).
IANADoctor and say the above from an admittedly old memory of talking to a friend’s father who is (was?) a brain surgeon.
I think it depends on the kind of surgery. IANADoctor either, but I’ve had neurosurgery twice and both times I was under a general anaesthetic. The first time I think I must have been completely out. I didn’t even begin to wake up until an hour or so after the surgery was complete, and it took me about another hour to achieve full consciousness. (This was considered remarkably fast.) The second time was a more difficult and delicate procedure, and I can remember everything but the surgery itself. My primary care physician later told me he’d heard from the surgeons that I was talking to them the whole time, so I must have been somewhat conscious even during the period that I was too doped up to remember.
Anyway, the brain itself indeed does not feel pain. The rest of the head can feel a lot of pain though, which is what makes brain surgery unpleasant for the patient.