How to Control Your Sense of Pain & Pleasure
Huberman Lab
Scicomm Media
4.8 • 26.2K Ratings
🗓️ 9 August 2021
⏱️ 135 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. |
| 0:09.0 | I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. |
| 0:15.0 | Today we continue our discussion of the senses and the senses we are going to discuss are pain and pleasure. |
| 0:23.0 | 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. |
| 0:36.0 | Our skin is our largest sensory organ and our largest organ indeed. |
| 0:42.0 | It is much larger than any of the other organs in our body and it's an odd organ if you think about it. |
| 0:48.0 | It has so many functions. It acts as a barrier between our organs and the outside world. |
| 0:53.0 | It harbors neurons, nerve cells that allow us to detect things like light touch or temperature or pressure of various kinds. |
| 1:03.0 | 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. |
| 1:14.0 | And it's an organ that allows us to experience either great pain or great pleasure. |
| 1:21.0 | So it's a multifaceted organ and it's one that our brain needs to make sense of in a multifaceted way. |
| 1:28.0 | 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. |
| 1:37.0 | 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. |
| 1:49.0 | 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. |
| 2:01.0 | 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. |
| 2:14.0 | 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. |
| 2:25.0 | Most of us have heard of dopamine. Dopamine is a neuro modulator meaning it modulates or changes the way that neurons nerve cells work. |
| 2:35.0 | Most of us have heard that dopamine is the molecule of pleasure. However that is incorrect. Dopamine is a molecule of motivation and anticipation. |
| 2:46.0 | To illustrate how dopamine works, I want to highlight some very important work largely carried out by the laboratory of a guy named Wolfram Schultz. |
| 2:56.0 | The Schultz laboratory has done dozens of excellent experiments on the dopamine system and have identified something called reward prediction error. |
| 3:07.0 | Although in some sense you can think about it as reward prediction variance. Changes in the levels of dopamine depending on whether or not you expect a reward and whether or not you get the reward. |
| 3:18.0 | So I'm going to make this very simple. Dopamine is released into the brain and body and generally makes us feel activated and motivated and as if we have energy to pursue a goal. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Scicomm Media, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Scicomm Media and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.