I'm TT and I'm Zachiah, and this is Dope Labs. Welcome to Dope Labs, a weekly podcast that mixes hardcore science with pop culture and a healthy dose of friendship. We started talking about the brain last week in our grab bag, but that was really just a preview, just a little snippet. That's right, realizing how important the brain is and how much we need sleep and all the things that's beneficial for down to bone growth for kids
and metabolism for adults. Okay, that's right, Because y'all were talking about doing the Great lock in and we said, you need to do the Great lay down. Okay, and it's time to make a little commotion for the brain. Neuroscience is who we thought rocket science was. You know how people say, right, it's not rocket science. Neuroscience actually
is that gru Okay, that's where the complexity lies. We were looking outside when we needed to turn inside, turn this body inside out and take a look into the brain. So this episode, we're looking at the neuroscience of pain, and we have the perfect guest expert to do just that. All right, TT, let's jump into the recitation. What do we want to know? I want to know stuff like how is neuroscience at work in our everyday lives? What is the mechanism of pain? Like how do you go
from incident to ouch? What is going on in my cranium? Yes, and then I want to know more about like the memories and stuff tied into pain, because there's a lot of conversation on my timline right now about this. You know that book The Body keeps the Score. Yes, people are saying it's not right or it's trash. Now that's what Atlanta told me. Really, Atlanta told me the body does not keep the score. She was like, that's why you don't remember giving birth to that baby. Oh see,
I haven't read the full thing. I don't know all the commentary. Has anybody else heard this? And even if what's going on there is different from what we're talking about, does the body keep the score in regards to pain in some kind of way? Does the brain keep the score? Then? Right, and then there's a cute versix chronic pain, And these are different pathways in my mind. They are like different experiences. But my mind has been wrong a time or two. Okay,
I've only seen it once. I've only seen it wrong once, and I Also, you know, I'm on the woo woop party the Internet, and so I want to know about some of the wellness advice around pain, like mindfulness, cold plunges, breath work. Do those actually change how we experience pain? Or is that Gwyneth Paltrow goop stuff. No shade to her as an actress, because I liked her in Shakespeare in Love, Iron Man, and you know I liked her
in Contagent. But I have not forgotten about that lawsuit where she was advertising those jade eggs saying it was balancing hormones and regulating mistro cycles. And it wasn't. Yeah, Gwyneth, that was right, It wasn't. But to answer all of these questions, we have the perfect guest expert. So I'm going to let them introduce themselves and let them tell us how they got into the neuroscience of pain.
My name's Lindsay Edgoe.
I'm a neuroscience patry candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, and I am really interested in the neuro circuits that underlie pain. It's interesting because I get this question a lot, like what got you interested in pain neuroscience? And the answer is it was honestly random, because when I was an undergraduate, I was looking.
For research labs to join and get more experience doing research.
So I was looking through Pitt's website and I saw this lab that studied something called optogenetics, which is pretty much a way to use light to change the activity of brain cells. And I thought that was so cool that I immediately, you know, the professor saying I wanted to work with him, and he said, okay, that's great.
I study pain, so I study.
Optientemics in the context of pain relief. So that's why I ended up in the pain field. And then from there my interest just grew and grew and grew, and I just stuck with.
It and planned to in the future too.
There's neuroscience and basically so many parts of our everyday life, and I'd love for you to share anything that you feel like people don't commonly think of. And you're like, oh, neuroscience at play in action.
Yeah, you're right, it is at play all the time. I mean, our brains generate the conscious experience we live every day. I mean, thinking about where you are right now, even as one of the listeners, you're probably either walking down the street or sitting on a train during your commute. Think about the ground under your feet, the feeling of the chair under your legs, how your body feels in space. Are you in any pain, do you have any aches or sore spots right now?
Going on?
What do you see in front of you.
There's all of this visual information being fed to your brain every second, and you're honestly dealing with so much, like general sensory information in general, from all your sensings at all times.
It's amazing.
I think about this all the time, but it's amazing how the brain can even reconcile this all at once because so much that's happening to us at all times. But we also have to like put most of it in the back of our heads and kind of just treat it as background as we do whatever task we're doing, like listening to the podcast, processing the words that you're listening to right now, whatever you might be doing right It's like the brain is constantly active and constantly doing this thing.
So everything is neuroscience. Like our entire existence, everything that we do, feel, experience all relates to neuroscience because our brains are part of those interactions all the time. What a huge topic. Yes, exact now we know it's a neuroscience plays a role in every aspect of our lives. But we want to focus on and pain, which is your specific research. Well, I know pain is a part of everyone's life, Like we experienced some type of pain in some type of way at any given moment during
our days. When we think about pain, it's usually like physical damage, like where you can see the damage on your body. My son actually hit me in the eye accidentally. He's not abusing me. I was in so much pain and you could see it. My eye was like red and swollen and it really really hurt, really bad. But what about the experience of pain in the brain? What is going on? How we go from like incident to ouch, and like what happens in between those moments in your brain.
So not to rub it in your face, but let's use your eye be hurt as an example here. Okay, the first thing that happened when he hits your eye was you probably closed it immediately. This is like your reflex response. So this really quick signal gets sent to your cord and it tells your muscles clutsure eye.
Somebody's going on.
And then very very very soon after you start feeling it, so that information travels from the nerves in your eye to the spinal cord and then travels from the spinal cord up to your brain, up to the airs that are going to process how you're feeling. Not only the quote unquote sensation of it, which is how much it hurts, how it feels, was it sharp, was it dull? Where is that even located, but also all the other aspects of pain, like bringing it to your conscious attention. So
pain hurts, pain is annoying. I know you were not happy when your eye got hurt. It not only tells you what hurts, but also affects your emotions. It's like the quote unquote suffering associated with that physical sensation, and it overlaps with all these different circuits in your brain that process emotion and mood. So it's this very complex experience that involves things like emotion and attention, and you might think about it later to so memory, the memory
of that too gets encoded. So it's this huge, very complex process that starts with something interacting with your eye and ending with this pretty complex experience that you will remember afterwards.
Right right, Lindsay I love how you broke that down because I feel like pain is this thing we do not have a good grasp on. We have so many advances, so much technology, so many things we know, and pain feels like this hard thing for us to wrap our arms around. And I don't hear people talk about the
emotional aspect of pain. But two or three episodes ago, we talked to doctor Jessica Bodie, who's also at the University of Pennsylvania at the School of Medicine, and doctor Bodie talked about are iFIT, which is the eating disorder where you have like restrictive eating, and she talked about how people who have early pain from like gastrointestinal problems or diet jest of issues, it makes them hesitant to try new foods and do different things because of the
memory of that pain. And it also made me think about something that I haven't talked about a lot. I am technically on vacation right but I'm doing a lot
of physical activity now. I had about of sciatica a long time ago, and I have been so nervous to retrigger that shooting pain, and it makes me walk gingerly when I'm doing different it makes me change my whole everything, and even when I think about what I couldn't do and how I felt when I was going through this, and it was almost like a depression in addition to
the physical ailment. Are we starting to understand more about like what are you learning in your lab about the emotional ties to pain?
Yeah, for sure, So before we even talk about that, Like, there's what you mentioned having sciatica. There's a difference between this everyday pain that you might feel from stubbing your toe or touching on hot stove and this long term chronic form of pain that can happen from nerve injuries like psiatica, and that chronic pain largely uses different brain circuits than that acute type of pain, and it's also tightened with the emotional stuff and you form that memory
over time too. So for example, my dad also had zyetica and he was very unhappy. And a lot of people who have chronic pain also co present with disorders like depression and anxiety, And it sucks because then anxiety and stress also interact with pain circuits to make pain feel even worse. So the stress from feeling pain can also increase your pain perception and it's like this destructive cycle.
And if you think about it, evolutionarily, an animal would want to feel bad after feeling pain because the goal is to avoid physical.
Harm so that you can continue your species.
But it's like that way out of order where you feel bad and you feel worse, and you feel worse and you feel worse, and it's kind of hard sometimes to break out of it. That's why a lot of people find that their chronic pain disorders get better after getting things like cognitive behavioral therapy or something called pain repressing therapy, which separates the feeling of pain from the fear of it and that anxiety that comes with it.
Oh my gosh, that's deep. That is very very deep. I mean you're talking about different areas of your brain that are active during different types of pain. What is the difference in the brain signal, So like I get hit in the eye, I stubb my toe, I get a paper cut, I burn my hand, versus I have this injury from a car accident that is really causing
me a lot of pain. The signals that your brain is sending, or the areas of your brain that are being activated, what are those different areas and why is that the response for those different types of pain.
So the answer is like pretty complicated because it.
Changes in every area.
So there are areas that are involved in both the short term as we call it a cute pain and that low long term chronic pain. And then for example, I study in an area called the thalmis, and the thalamus is involved in both acute and chronic pain.
And then also quote unquote emotional.
Part of the physical pain is processed like in the middle of the thalmis, and then that sensation is on the outside of the thelmis or the edges of it. So it's like a cute and chronic pain kind of overlap too sometimes and then also don't overlap in other brain areas, so it kind of just depends on the area you're talking about. So then the question of why would this happen, Well, one is that chronic pain doesn't start chronic, It starts acute.
So it's a transition. So it starts off in certain areas and then.
It kind of like these brain patterns and these networks shift.
It's called like synaps of plasticity.
This I don't call it learning, but it's this changing the brain changes the way it's wired to kind of accommodate this new state in which you are in pain almost constantly, and that looks different just as a result, like I said earlier, because of all these things that the pain is doing to affect the other brain processes as well.
So it's very complicated and it's different in every person.
So it would be really easy if you could just target a particular brain area right and be like, Okay, this is gonna look exactly like this one is a cute, and exactly like that one is chronic. But it sometimes differs between people, so it's not as easy as to treat.
Even our perceptions of pain is different from person to person, so what is very painful for one person might not be as painful. I think about when folks be like, oh, yeah, I'm tenderheaded, like when they get braids done and stuff, and to me, like when I'm getting braids done and they're doing it really tight, it feels very nice to me, Like I don't know why. Like the play, I'm like, ooh,
that feels nice. Like certain parts of my head, I'm like, oh, I wish you could undo this braid, redo it, because I don't know what it is about it, But that makes sense. People are experiencing pain in different ways. Is that something that is geneicic or is it something that you know it's just I'm lucky that I'm not tender.
I think it's a mixture of both.
Zakia was talking about certain pains that you feel can change the way you experience pain in the future. So maybe when you were a kid, you just remember how much it used to hurt, and like now you hate it and it feels even worse to you now. But sometimes it could just be genetic, like you just have a different pain tong th to somebody else, So it differs in that way. But the other thing I want
to say too is pain doesn't always feel bad. I mean, think about situations where you are in physical pain, but you like it, like a really deep tissue massage exactly. Yes, So that reminded me of that where like they're pulling like a scalp.
I cannot relate to that feeling, but I do know what it's like to get DeepC massage and be.
Like, oh, this hurts so good. So a lot of these tools like mindfulness. Earlier I was talking about therapy, like cognitive behavioral therapy, even things like hypnosis. I'm not going to tell you they don't work, because for some people they work a lot, but I will say they're not what we would consider a cure because they don't work.
On everybody and they don't work every time.
Okay, so these techniques might not work on everybody, but for the people that they do work on or the people they work for, how sway, how does it work? How are they turned down the pain dial?
Something we study in our lab two is really big part of my PhD project is the natural opioid system. So you might have heard of opioids drugs like morphine or fentanyl even or heroin. Your brain makes its own opioids, natural ones. A good example you might know is endorphins that get released, you know, after exercise. Those are actually
natural opiend molecules that can relieve pain. So there's this huge, growing field of literature where people are studying how natural opioids and other natural chemicals can help cause pain relief without any drugs, and how those are released during things like hypnosis or mindfulness and other things like that.
So there's definitely a basis to it, and.
I think the ultimate goal is to kind of quote unquote hack that natural opioid system. Because opioid drugs have harmful side effects. They can block your muscle movement, including the muscles that help you breathe or which can be fatal.
They can be highly addictive. But these natural opioids are released in very tiny amounts in very specific parts of the brain in a way that gives you that pain relief without this dependence or any of these negative side effects by like bathing the whole body in opioids like you would when you take a drug.
Okay, so now I really want to zoom into your specific research. What questions are you trying to answer with your PhD work and how are you studying that and what has surprised you so far.
The first question that I tried to answer was based
on this natural pain relieving process. And something I didn't mention is another time that these natural opiids get released is during placebo, during what we call this expectation of pain relief, just the expectation that something will relieve your pain can be enough to relieve your pain because of the release of these natural opious So what we did in our lab was we use this model where we basically taught animals to relieve their own pain, kind of
trick them into doing it, because you know, you can't.
Just be like, relieve your pain, it's a mouse.
So what we did was we would put them into two different chambers and be like, in this chamber, you're gonna feel pain from like a warm plate that's under them. Not too hot that they burn their skin or anything like that, but definitely uncomfortable, something that they don't want to be in. So you put them in one chamber and say this chamber is associated with pain and the
other one is not. Every day you put them in the pain chamber and they are able to freely run into the one that's safe, and they learned that when they make this action into this quote unquote safe chamber, their pain is going to be relieved. Afterwards, we make that safe chamber unsafe again. So they've run into the other chamber, and you would expect them to realize that it's hot and start exhibiting behaviors that show that they're in pain.
But instead we saw that the.
Animals would run into the other chamber and even though they're still on a hot plate, they would be sitting there.
Wow, chilling.
They weren't even they weren't even moving much. They weren't like in any kind of distress. It wouldn't last very long. We'd be around ninety seconds. But in that time, yeah, honestly, it is long. In that time, they would mostly be still, maybe a little bit of grooming, and then you would see them be like, oh wait, it would wear off a little bit. They'd start walking around and then they'd be like, oh no. They run to the other side.
They realize, oh wait, nothing's safe, and by then the tests almost over.
So we just put them out.
But it's this process of that expectation, just the expectation that it's going to be safe. There is enough for even a mouse to quote unquote like relieve its own pain. So then what we do in the lab is we have different brain areas that we know are involved in pain relief and this natural opiod release.
So what we're doing is tracking the activity of.
Cells that are involved in pain relief during this process and then also measuring the actual opioids that get released and just seeing how can we further understand this process. This model was just created in the past few years, and we really haven't had a good one since then, and we didn't really have a good one before then,
so still early stages. But it's really cool because we get to really investigate these brains because of how they change in this process, so that we can work towards building tools to harness what we've.
Learned and replicating in a way.
That's safe for people, well, first mice and then people who live with chronic pain.
I can draw so many parallels, which I know, lindsay, you may say not scientific, don't do as a kid, but I was just thinking when you were talking about this, about this model of like expectation of pain relief, and we learned this from being children. You know, you get a boo boo and a parent comforts you and they like, let me kiss it is gonna make it feel better. You think it feels better. They didn't do anything, you know,
but it's just the expectation that it feels better. All they're doing is spreading those germs around.
And.
I disinfected, right. I think about that, and then I think about this as an adult. And I'm extrapolating a little bit, quite a bit, but I'm thinking about what it means to move through a world that may feel unsafe, but to have community that does feel safe, Like when I know I'm gonna be with my friends, I have the expectation of pain relief, and I'm already feeling good
expecting that. So even if things are unbearable, they're a little less unbearable, right, Like it feels a little bit more tolerable, even for ninety seconds, Like the animals and the experiment like the same thing, And I think there's something really beautiful to that, for sure.
The powerfulacebo.
It's one of the strongest placebo effects that your body can do when it comes to pain. So much of that experience of pain is mediated and generated by the brain and can be changed by the brain too, if only it could be done very easily.
We're still working on that.
I know that for me when I think about like just like common pain that I have, it's like headaches, back aches, my shoulder might be hurting or something like that. I have some wrist pain and I'm always taking like a tile and all or something like that. And I know that a lot of folks don't. It always goes viral on my timeline, which means it's a question I have too, like how do these pain relievers work, Like, how does it know that the pain is in my wrist?
How does it know that my head hurts? And these are questions that folks have. Can you talk a little bit about how some of these pain relieving medicines drugs work and what they're doing when they get in our body.
I can talk about hyberprofen for example.
Hyberprofen is what we call an instead, so it stands for a non steroidal anti inflammatory drug.
If you have a stomach ache or a wrist ache and you take.
A certain amount of eyberprofen, it's not necessarily that the hyberprofen is traveling to your wrists or your belly and telling it come.
It's really.
Going all over the body and it's just floating around and relieving inflammation. So if you have a kind of pain that's like driven by inflammation, then just putting this drug in your system, it'll eventually get to that area and fee your blood and then relieve that and that can help reduce the amount of pain signals that get
sent to your brain. Or maybe you're used to taking iboprofen all the time and you know what's worked before, so just the process of taking that truck can be enough to at least help their brain be.
Like ooh, this painerly is coming.
I'm going to just start doing the motion. TT's mind is strong. I could give TT a jelly bean and she'll be like pain relieved, okay, the same way braining up her scalp feels wonderful. I think you should study TT and the pain. Don't study means so scary. I know we're coming close to time. I want to ask you one more thing. I'm curious as we continue to
learn more. I think there were things before people used to laugh about the placebo effect, and it's like, now, look, you know we're changing, we know more, we are opening our minds more. I'm curious about what you might be excited about. I feel like there's neuroscience in the news all the time. Recently, I saw something about phantom limbs, like when somebody loses a limb and that they still
feel the limb being there. And now we know. I saw a paper that just came out like, yeah, the brain has a map of the body and it doesn't change when you have like a limb amputated. So it makes sense things that people thought were like oh, they don't really feel this. We are continuing to expand what we know about what the brain does. What are you excited about, what do you see in the pipeline, or what do you not see but want to see in your field? Any of those.
So something I'm personally excited about is another side of pain that is studied less, and that is something called visceral pain or this like internal pain that might happen. So like I mentioned earlier, stomach aches, pains in your intestines from insulatory bowel, moving out of the intestines, pelvic
pain from periods, women's health. There's so many understudied topics within that field and how the brain processes those types of pain, because we're beginning to understand it's not the exact same way as you would feel when you have something that gives you pain on your skin versus internal organs.
So I think that the field is definitely learning more about things like endometrios is pain or sickle cell pain and then colon cancer pain, these things that come from these internal organs that kind of got a later start to being studied, And I'm really excited about that, and that's the kind of work I want to do in
the future. My goal is to end up starting my own lab and that's what I want to study in that so I'm very excited about that space, especially as it applies to people with pain disorders that are just not studied as much as others are. I'm very excited about the way the field is going too, and I know that if we broaden the types of things that we study and we fund and we really go in depth, I think we will definitely have.
A bigger impact as a field and people won't.
Just think of pain as oh, that's the thing I feel sometimes when I stub my toe, but really as something that can really impact somebody's entire life and does require a lot of time, attention, and money to help solve.
Yes, Lindsey, I think you've given us a lot to think about. I know I'm going to be taking that expectation of the pain and trying to apply that to all things in my life. Okay, is there anything else you think our listeners should know?
Well, all just said something I say all the time, your experience of pain, somebody might be telling you you're making it up. And even if there is no quote unquote evidence in your physical body, that you're experiencing that pain.
That doesn't mean that your pain isn't real.
Like I said, it is an experience generated by your brain, and it is felt by you and it is processed in complex ways throughout your body and affects your life. So that does not mean that it is not real. And honor that. And definitely, like I said, there's no absolute cure for pain, but there are many many strategies that many people find super helpful that I've changed their lives. Please do your research, find what works for you, and I'm rooting for you and for your release.
Love it. Thank you so much for joining us today, Lindsay, thank you.
This is really cool, you know.
T T This lap really opened my eyes. I feel like pain is something that all of us experience, but hearing it broken down in this way, it makes me think of it like a lot differently, not even just a little bit. Yeah, Like it's so much more complex. Like the way that I experience pain and the way that you experience pain is different and all valid, you
know what I mean. And so it's just like we all have to be a lot more understanding and open our minds up to people having different experiences than we are. It feels just like the Arfit episode that we did where it was just like, oh, somebody that has this disorder, you know, is experiencing this. And it's not just like, oh, you're a picky eater, or why don't you like this thing? How come you're only eating whatever chicken tenders at the restaurant.
We have to take a step back and be like, listen, everyone is different, Yes, and I think we just touched the tip of the iceberg when it comes to like chronic pain, and when Lindsay was explaining these emotional aspects and how you remember things and how early experiences or late experiences can make you want to avoid pain. I've
never broken a bone. I don't want to, Okay, Like, just thinking about all of those things and how the colors, how we move through the world, how we anticipate pain or anticipate relief from it, it just was so much. I feel like it just cracked my skull open just a bit. I've never broken a bone, I've never been stung by a bee. I don't want any of those things. And so yes, when I see that bee, I'm taking off honey. Okay, Yeah. My friend turned to flow joe H.
That's right. A big thank you to Lindsey Edgoe, also known as neuro Melody on Instagram. Check out the show description. We will have her handle there. You can click and learn more about neuroscience directly from her. You can find us on X and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast, ct is on X and Instagram at dr Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakiya at z said So. Dope Labs is a production of Leimanada Media. Our supervising producer
is Keegan Zimma and our producer is Issara Asevez. Dope Labs is sound designed, edited and mixed by James Farber. Limanada Media's Vice President of Partnerships and Production is Jackie Danziger. Executive producer from iHeart podcast is Katrina Norvil. Marketing lead is Alison Kanter. Original music composed and produced by taking Yasuzawa and Alex sugi Ura, with additional music by Elijah Harvey. Dope Labs is executive produced by us T T Show Dia and Zakiyah Watki