Complex Numbers

Pleasure and Pain

Ever notice that it's possible for the same stimulus to evoke pleasure or pain, depending on context?

    Pleasure or Pain? He Maps the Neural Circuits That Decide.  
The work of the neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has opened up a world of insights into precisely how much pleasure and pain animals experience during different forms of touch.

My only hesitation here is that doing research on pain often means deliberately causing pain, and to me, that's ethically questionable at best. Especially when the subjects can't consent. But it was only a hesitation; I'm doing this entry anyway. As an omnivore, there's a limit to how much hypocrisy I'll tolerate in myself when it comes to this sort of thing.

Ishmail Abdus-Saboor has been fascinated by the variety of the natural world since he was a boy growing up in Philadelphia.

Probably because there's so much of it in Philadelphia.

Yes, I know I've pointed out before that, as we are part of the natural world, so is everything we build. But I never let the facts get in the way of a good joke. Or a bad one. Especially a bad one.

Today, he is an associate professor of biological sciences at the Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University, where he studies how the brain determines whether a touch to the skin is painful or pleasurable.

From Philadelphia to Manhattan... hm. Anything to stay out of New Jersey, I suppose.

To find those clues, Abdus-Saboor probes the nervous system at every juncture along the skin-to-brain axis. He does not focus on skin alone or home in on only the brain as many others do. “We merge these two worlds,” he said.

This kind of ties in with other things I've been saying. People tend to draw a boundary between body and brain, probably because of old ideas about mind/body duality, but the brain is part of the body.

Abdus-Saboor has also pioneered a new quantitative measure of pain in mice, a tool he and his team adapted to gather evidence for the transgenerational inheritance of opioid addiction.

The addiction thing aside, I'm intrigued about the "quantitative measure of pain" thing. Pain in humans is often subjective; hence the classic 1-10 scale doctors ask you to rate your own pain on. Pain in other animals is generally inferred by their reactions, but it gets tricky; for a long time, people thought nonhuman animals didn't actually experience pain as such. The latter part of the article discusses this further.

Quanta spoke with Abdus-Saboor about his penchant for starting over in science, his zebra fish eureka moment and his hopes for a newly imported naked mole rat colony.

Thus, the rest of the article is in interview format. I won't quote more, but it's there at the link. I find it interesting on several levels, not least of which is the actual science involved, but also because, to me, it illustrates why it's important to have people from different backgrounds, with different worldviews, working on scientific research.