Hey there, it's Sanjay.

You know, I've been thinking a lot about pain recently.

Like love and joy, pain is an integral part of the human experience.

At the beginning of this season, I talked with Science writer and author Ed Young about

pain being considered one of our senses, and like any other sense, it's subjective.

It is more of an experience than a sensation.

The pain that you feel.

That's what happens when your brain processes the information from a type of neuron called

a no-susceptor.

A no-susceptor detects potentially damaging sensations.

Think, a hand, touching a hot stove or a foot, stepping on attack.

But it's a lot more than that.

As a neurosurgeon, I deal with pain a lot in my line of work.

We often ask patients to rate their pain on a scale of one to ten.

It's hard to do, and it can even change in that same patient from moment to moment.

Oftentimes we try to speculate how much pain someone might have based on an MRI scan of

an injured joint or an organ.

But it is hard to quantify.

And sometimes hard to fix, completely, impermanently.

All of us, patients, doctors, society, we all have a hard time dealing with understanding

how to quantify the experience of pain.

But today I decided to reshare an episode we did last year about pain.

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