Essentials: How to Control Your Sense of Pain & Pleasure

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today, we continue our discussion of the senses. And the senses we are going to discuss are pain and pleasure. Pain and pleasure reflect two opposite ends of a continuum, A continuum that involves detection of things in our skin, and the perception, the understanding of what those events are. Our skin is our largest sensory organ, and our largest organ indeed. It is much larger than any of the other organs in our body. And it's an odd organ if you think about it. It has so many functions. It acts as a barrier between our organs and the outside world. It harbors neurons, nerve cells that allow us to detect things like light touch or temperature or pressure of various kinds. And it's an organ that we hang ornaments on. People put earrings in their ears. People decorate their skin with tattoos and inks and other things. And it's an organ that allows us to experience either great pain or great pleasure. So it's a multifaceted organ, and it's one that our brain needs to make sense of in a multifaceted way. I think we all intuitively understand what pleasure and pain are. Pleasure generally is a sensation in the body and in the mind that leads us to pursue more of whatever is bringing about that sensation. And pain is also a sensation in the body and in the mind that in general leads us to want to withdraw or move away from some activity or interaction. Scientists would call this appetitive behaviors, meaning behaviors that lead us to create an appetite for more of those behaviors, and aversive behaviors, behaviors that make us want to move away from something. The organ that we call the skin, as I mentioned earlier, is the largest organ in our body. And throughout that organ, we have neurons, little nerve cells. Now to be really technical about it, and the way I'd like you to understand it is that the so called cell body, meaning the location of a cell in which the DNA and other goodies, the kind of central factory of the cell, that actually sits right outside your spinal cord. So, all up and down your spinal cord on either side are these little blobs of neurons, little collections of neurons. They're called DRGs, dorsal root ganglia. A ganglion is just a collection or a clump of cells. And those DRGs are really interesting because they send one branch that we call an axon, a little wire, out to our skin. And they have another wire from that same cell body that goes in the opposite direction, which is up to our brain and creates connections within our brain in the so called brain stem. …