How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure? | PODCAST: The Joy of Why

By Quanta Magazine

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Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior. “The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. For more episodes visit Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/ --------- 0:00 – Introduction: skin, pleasure, and pain 3:06 – Ishmael Abdus-Saboor's path to science 8:18 – Do animals feel pain? 12:12 – Studying pain in rodents 14:54 – Mapping the somatosensory system 20:54 – Building a pain scale 25:05 – From lab discoveries to human pain therapies 29:21 – Placebo, psychology, and pain-addiction links 34:55 – Gentle touch, optogenetics, and social bonding 41:03 – Naked mol

Tags: biology, neurons, neuroscience, perception, The Joy of Why, pain, naked mole rat, psychology, sense of touch, senses, skin