Summary
Scientists reveal why we feel pain and the consequences of life without pain. One way to understand the experience of pain is to look at unusual situations which give clues to our everyday agony.
Phantom limb pain was described in ancient times but only after WWI did it gain acceptance in modern medicine. For those living with it, it can be a painful reminder of a lost limb. New studies are now unravelling why the brain generates this often unpleasant experience and how the messages can be used positively.
Its only since the 1980s that doctors agreed that babies are able to feel pain but we still don’t know how the developing brain processes information and how premature babies can be protected from the many invasive tests they have to go through. New research aims to provide appropriate pain relief that could have long term consequences.
Picture: Nerve cells, computer artwork, Credit: Science Photo Library
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:41.0 | Hello. Hello, I'm Professor Irene Tracy, and the noise you can hear in the background there is an MRI scanner. |
| 0:50.0 | As a pain researcher, I spend a lot of my life looking at what happens in someone's brain when they feel pain. |
| 0:55.6 | And although we feel that we have pain either all over the body or in a particular bit, |
| 1:00.0 | it is in fact the brain that's telling us we're in agony. |
| 1:03.0 | And so over the years, that's why I've used these advanced MRI machines |
| 1:07.0 | to look at all types of pain in people. |
| 1:10.0 | And in today's discovery on the BBC World Service, I want to show you how we answer some of the really |
| 1:15.3 | difficult questions in pain research. I'm going to be asking, why do we feel pain anyway? |
| 1:20.5 | What's the point of it? What happens if you don't feel pain at all and the |
| 1:24.3 | consequences of that? And why is it that people who've had a limb amputated can feel |
| 1:29.8 | it still and can have phantom pain in that limb. |
| 1:33.0 | I'm with Joanna Burke, who's professor of history at Birkbeck College, |
| 1:37.0 | and you may remember my conversation with her from last week, |
| 1:40.0 | she's telling me now how we've known actually about Phantom Limpane for a very long time. |
| 1:45.4 | Phantom pain was actually acknowledged right back to ancient times. |
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