The Future in Mind
The Future in Mind
Touch: Pain Sensitivity Reexamined
To be human is to know pain. More than 50 million adults in the United States report feeling it most days. Yet modern medicine still struggles with pain measurement and with racial biases in these measurements. Treatments for chronic pain are often ineffective and can become addictive.
That’s why neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is rethinking pain.
Cells specialized to perceive pain were discovered in the late 1960s. But when scientists tried to disrupt those cells, the sensations didn’t magically vanish. Dr. Abdus-Saboor’s lab has shown that the picture is more complex. Some cells register pain, but other types detect pleasurable touch or heat and cold, and some, called polymodal cells, multitask.
“We’re even starting to see cells for different types of pain, like pulling on a hair or fire on your skin versus deep indentation,” said Dr. Abdus-Saboor. “Different molecular classes of pain neurons mediate those distinct sensations.”
The researchers developed machine learning that monitors an animal’s responses to unpleasant stimuli. These reactions can be compared to brain imaging data to identify brain activity that signifies pain.
The Abdus-Saboor lab found that one animal, the naked mole rat, doesn’t respond typically to pain. The animal has no reaction to capsaicin, the active ingredient in pepper. This suggests that naked mole rats might have a way to inhibit pain, one that could help us develop new treatments for pain, said Dr. Abdus-Saboor, whose lab has also discovered some of the neurons that underlie pleasurable and sexual touches.
“This is a place where we are incentivized to tackle difficult problems,” said Dr. Abdus-Saboor. “All of us in neuroscience are explorers, adventurers.”
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Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, PhD
Associate Professor of Biological Sciences; Principal Investigator at Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute
Touch: Pain Sensitivity Reexamined
To be human is to know pain. More than 50 million adults in the United States report feeling it most days. Yet modern medicine still struggles with pain measurement and with racial biases in these measurements. Treatments for chronic pain are often ineffective and can become addictive.
That’s why neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor is rethinking pain.
Cells specialized to perceive pain were discovered in the late 1960s. But when scientists tried to disrupt those cells, the sensations didn’t magically vanish. Dr. Abdus-Saboor’s lab has shown that the picture is more complex. Some cells register pain, but other types detect pleasurable touch or heat and cold, and some, called polymodal cells, multitask.
“We’re even starting to see cells for different types of pain, like pulling on a hair or fire on your skin versus deep indentation,” said Dr. Abdus-Saboor. “Different molecular classes of pain neurons mediate those distinct sensations.”
The researchers developed machine learning that monitors an animal’s responses to unpleasant stimuli. These reactions can be compared to brain imaging data to identify brain activity that signifies pain.
The Abdus-Saboor lab found that one animal, the naked mole rat, doesn’t respond typically to pain. The animal has no reaction to capsaicin, the active ingredient in pepper. This suggests that naked mole rats might have a way to inhibit pain, one that could help us develop new treatments for pain, said Dr. Abdus-Saboor, whose lab has also discovered some of the neurons that underlie pleasurable and sexual touches.
“This is a place where we are incentivized to tackle difficult problems,” said Dr. Abdus-Saboor. “All of us in neuroscience are explorers, adventurers.”
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