Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

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 in 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.

So today we're going to discuss all that and most importantly how you can experience more pleasure and less pain by understanding these pathways.

We will also discuss things you can do and if you wish things you can take that will allow you to experience more pleasure and less pain in response to a variety of different experiences.

I'm pleased to announce that the Huberman Lab podcast is now partnered with Momentus Supplements.

We partnered with Momentus for several important reasons.

First of all they ship internationally because we know that many of you are located outside of the United States.

Second of all perhaps most important the quality of their supplements is second to none both in terms of purity and precision of the amounts of the ingredients.

Third we've really emphasized supplements that are single ingredient supplements and that are supplied in dosages that allow you to build a supplementation protocol that's optimized for cost that's optimized for effectiveness and that you can add things and remove things from your protocol in a way that's really systematic and scientific.

If you'd like to see the supplements that we partner with Momentus on you can go to live momentus.com slash Huberman there you'll see those supplements and just keep in mind that we are constantly expanding the library of supplements available through Momentus on a regular basis.

Again that's live momentus.com slash Huberman before I go any further I want to highlight a particularly exciting area of science that relates to the skin and to sensing of pleasure and pain but has everything to do with motivation.

Motivation is something that many people struggle with not everybody but most people experience dips and peaks in their motivation even if they really want something how should we think about these changes in motivation what do they reflect well at a very basic level they reflect fluctuations changes in the levels of a chemical called dopamine.

Most of us have heard of dopamine dopamine is a neuro modulator meaning it modulates or changes the way that neurons nerve cells work most of us have heard that dopamine is the molecule of pleasure however that is incorrect dopamine is a molecule of motivation and anticipation to illustrate how dopamine works I want to highlight some very important work largely carried out by the laboratory of a guy named Wolfram Schumann.

...