Controlling Pain

Discovery

BBC

Science, Technology

4.3 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 5 February 2018

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What if your brain could naturally control pain? Professor Irene Tracey and her colleagues are trying to unlock the natural mechanisms in the brain that limit the amount of pain we feel.

We hear about how children learning judo are taught special techniques and from ex-marine Chris Shirley who ran a marathon carrying a 45kg rucksack and could ignore the pain of the blisters and torn shoulder muscles. One study found that religious people feel less pain than agnostics by looking at a picture of the Virgin Mary. Neuroscientists and psychologists are beginning to understand how this is possible, how the brain can block out pain in the right circumstances, so is this something we could all benefit from?

Picture: The statue of the Virgin Mary, Credit: Francisco Leong/AFP/Getty Images

Producer Geraldine Fitzgerald

Transcript

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0:00.0	Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless
0:06.8	searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the
0:11.8	telly we share what we've been watching
0:14.0	Cladie Aide.
0:16.0	Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.
0:19.0	Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.
0:21.0	And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less
0:24.9	searching and a lot more watching listen on BBC sounds this is the BBC.
0:47.8	Hello, I'm Professor Irene Tracy from the University of Oxford, and in this week's discovery on the BBC World Service, I'm going to be looking at how neuroscience and brain imaging has helped us to understand how the brain
0:54.8	controls the pain we feel. We all know that if you feel anxious or you expect
1:00.4	something to be painful it increases the pain in the agony so waiting at
1:04.3	the dentist for example for the needle or the syringe to go in is terrifying but also
1:09.4	telling ourselves after a run that those aching muscles feel good actually decreases the pain.
1:16.0	So today I'm sitting in on my son's karate class and I'm learning how really little children
1:22.0	are being taught to cope with pain. But we're also
1:25.6	going to be looking at the different mechanisms the brain uses to allow people to
1:29.6	get through unimaginable pain and how importantly our expectations of pain can be really a lot more
1:36.8	powerful than you ever expected. How beliefs around religion can change our
1:41.8	experience of pain. But for the moment, let's go back
1:45.2	to how children learn to manage the inevitable pain that goes with karate.
1:50.3	So I'm here in Oxford at the Oxford School of Martial Arts in the dojo and I'm standing before a slightly terrifying six foot sensey Mary Stevens who is a black belt karate.
2:01.0	Since you've obviously spent many years being beaten up and beating up people.
	...

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