How to Control Your Sense of Pain & Pleasure

This episode I discuss our sense of pain and pleasure: where and how they each arise in our mind and body and various ways to control their intensity. I discuss the science of behavioral tools like acupuncture and hypnosis and directed pressure, including the neural circuits they each activate to modulate our experience of pain or pleasure. I also discuss whole body pain, pain "syndromes" and novel pain relief compounds such as Acetyl-L-Carnitine, SAMe and Agmatine. I discuss neuroplasticity of the pain system and the key role that visual perception plays in pain modulation. Finally, I address the link between dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin, with arousal, pleasure and pain. As always, both basic science and various protocols are described.

Note: The description of the dorsal root ganglia (DRGs) was intentionally simplified and does not include mention of dorsal horn spinal relay neurons, etc. For an excellent full text review of this anatomy and circuits for touch sensing, please see: https://bit.ly/3jH9CPf

Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com.

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Timestamps

00:00:00 Skin, Pain, Pleasure

00:01:50 Protocol 1: Maximizing Motivation (with Dopamine & Pleasure)

00:07:29 Sponsors: AG1, LMNT & Waking Up

00:12:04 Pleasure & Pain, & Skin Sensors

00:18:13 Sensing Touch with Your Brain: Magnification of Feet, Hands, Lips, Face, Genitals

00:22:16 Two-Point Discrimination, Dermatomes

00:28:11 Thoughts & Genes That Make Physical Pain Worse

00:33:45 Expectations, Anxiety, & Pain Threshold

00:40:27 Protocol 2: Cold Sensing Is Relative; Getting Into Cold Water

00:45:22 Protocol 3: Heat Is Absolute

00:48:10 Injury & Pain

00:52:04 Protocol 4: Plasticity of Pain: Key Role of Vision

00:58:08 Sensing Disparate Body Parts As Merged

01:01:00 Pain “Syndromes”, Psychogenic Fever, “Psychosomatics”

01:04:40 Fibromyalgia, Naltrexone, Protocol 5: Acetyl-L-Carnitine

01:12:24 Protocol 6: Agmatine, S-adenosyl-L-methionine (SAMe), L-5-Methyltetrahydrofolate

01:17:27 Acupuncture: Mechanism, Non-Responders, Itch & Inflammation

01:28:20 Laser Photobiomodulation, Protocol 7: Hypnosis (reveri.com)

01:30:00 Protocol 8: Pressure-Based Pain Relief, “Gate Theory of Pain (Relief)”

01:37:53 Redheads & Pain Thresholds, Endogenous Opioids