Pleasure or pain? He maps the neural circuits that decide
Comments
h0l0cube
somedude895
> a skin cream to improve mental health — say, to offset the harm caused by social isolation or to treat anxiety or depression?
I know there are some serious mental health ailments that require pharmaceutical treatment, but using Soma-like chemicals to make humans simply feel okay with what's bothering them sounds to me like a surefire way to destroy a society. Things like antidepressants, weed, porn and social media have are already moved us in that direction, but seeing this sort of stuff as an achievement just sounds dystopian to me.
GuB-42
The same can be said of all painkillers and yet, opium hasn't destroyed society yet, despite thousands of years of use.
These drugs are not to be taken lightly, but I don't like pain, I don't like people being in pain, so if there are ways of making people feel better, I am all for it. And every new treatment we find is a new option, one that we may be able to use as a substitute for something with worse side effects, like opium.
somedude895
With physical pain you normally treat an illness or injury and use medication alongside it, except in cases of chronic pain or terminal illness. When psychopharmaceuticals are used while fixing the underlying issues, then that's great (the analogue of chronic pain being severe imbalances in brain chemistry, where treatment of symptoms is enough). In both cases the pain occurs to signal a problem. However, mental pain is often inevitable and even necessary for human development to learn to deal with adversity for example. You treat every occurrence of a negative feeling that has massive implications for society and how humans deal with each other, the sort of meddling that I fear no good would come of.
The quoted example of treating depression due to social isolation is a perfect example. People already feel depressed because they replace true human connection with parasocial and digital ones, and I think it would be absolutely destructive to just slap a feel-good-patch on every kid's arm rather than us recognizing as a collective that something is going the wrong way with our society.
h0l0cube
> I think it would be absolutely destructive to just slap a feel-good-patch on every kid's arm
Is the argument here that making pain medication more accessible inevitably leads to misuse? I suppose Tylenol would be problematic then.
Perhaps it’s a hypothetical high potency that is the concern? Then fentanyl is the concern here.
But what if fentanyl but no side effects? Is that world worse or better?
nextaccountic
When reading this, all I could think was: poor mice.
h0l0cube
The vast majority of mammalian biology research is based on mice. So many ‘in mice’ studies cross this forum, but this is the first time I’ve seen the ethical aspect raised. To that end, while I was reading the article I was thinking about how quantifiable pain measurement actually opens the door for more humane animal practices
nextaccountic
Maybe mice well being is so unimportant for the majority of people that people don't typically talk about it, even when talking about experiments designed to deliberately inflict pain on them.
h0l0cube
> even when talking about experiments designed to deliberately inflict pain on them.
I know someone on the ethics board at a university and the experiments here aren’t so terrible
> First, we verified that a stimulus deemed innocuous, like the touch of a soft makeup brush, activated touch neurons in the animal’s skin, and that a needle pricking the skin activated pain neurons. Then we recorded the animal’s response movements to each stimulus.
Human experiments on pain usually involve sticking a hand in a bucket of ice water. People taking their daily diabetes medication, prick skin multiple times a day without complaint, though it might be unpleasant.
But I’ll agree there’s a lack of sensitivity to the needless suffering of animals inflicted by humans. e.g., labs and factory farms have a lot to answer for. Though if we wanted to end suffering of all beings, we’d probably just want to terminate life completely such that a living being can never contrive to hurt another.. or somehow reengineer the biosphere to eliminate r-selection, and predation, an even more absurd proposition.
whiplash451
What a beautiful area of research. Kudos to Pr Abdus-Saboor and his team.
zafka
I agree, I plan to keep an eye on what they are doing. Reading this article is triggering an impulse in me to begin some research on some tangent ideas. While the probability of following that urge is relatively low, the idea is going into my list.
hackernewds
Is this an astroturf? the entire article seems SEOd too
whiplash451
Definitely not. This was genuine (I have zero connection to these people or to the field).
kwhitefoot
> I had hundreds of crayfish everywhere. My parents are not scientists, but they were very supportive of my escapades and adventures in the scientific realm.
Escapades and adventures. That's perfect I wish schools would encourage more of that.
sakshatshinde
Amazing
geopurcell
[flagged]
Euphorbium
Is this seo? I dont care about the ENTIRE life story, just give me the recipe. Still dont know what he did.
h0l0cube
It’s an interview which does cover what he’s worked on and what he’s working on now. I’d recommend actually reading TFA but here’s a sample of what he did:
> In my final year as a postdoc, I genetically engineered mice to have gentle touch neurons that responded to blue light. My plan was to stimulate the neurons with blue light and see what the mice did.
> When I started my own lab in 2018, we were ready to start those experiments. I still remember the day the students came into my office to show me what they had found. It was like this eureka moment. When we activated neurons through the skin on the mice’s backs, the animals behaved as if they were being stroked there. That launched the whole project. We did a lot more behavioral tests and traced the pathway for social touch from the skin to the spinal cord to the reward centers in the brain.
saurik
It sounds like you just dislike magazines. The entire point of a magazine is to spend more time and make an enjoyable read with a longer form article. Just because you prefer newspapers doesn't mean it makes sense to shit on magazines: some of us like magazines.
hackernewds
Perhaps struck a string?
klyrs
This isn't a recipe. It's an article about a human. His story is the point. His science is cool too, if you're actually interested in the science, it's super easy to find his publications.
vsuperpower2020
It's even worse that half the article is just massive, fullscreen pictures of this guy. I don't know how people "read" these rags.
klyrs
God forbid we gaze upon the visage of a scientist. It must be horribly jarring to read a textbook and see pictures of Einstein and Curie...
vsuperpower2020
If there was anything worth reading in magazines I'd also be mad if I had to scroll past 8 pages that were just pictures of Einstein standing in his field.
klyrs
Don't read magazines. They have pictures of humans. And stay away from IEEE journals, too.
vsuperpower2020
You can still enjoy rags even if they're mostly fluff and photoshoots. You don't have to convince me it's okay.
klyrs
I didn't realize that you being mad was a sign of enjoyment. Perhaps somebody should look into this curious apparent overlap of pleasure and pain!
throwaway0665
Your browser has a reader mode if you're offended by their design. You can also just delete the images in your console:
document.querySelectorAll("img").forEach(x => x.remove())EstanislaoStan
But what if the images are set as div backgrounds?
iknowstuff
idk, the pictures sure had my attention, know what im sayin?
knowaveragejoe
Did you stop after the first paragraph or something?
There's a lot of interesting stuff in this article and I came back to the comments on this to see if the discourse had corrected itself. Instead people are still taking affront (why?) to the article being an interview of a researcher, even though they are the common thread to a bunch of really interesting research. Here's some interesting things I'd like people to chime in on:
> We are also super excited about how the brain controls the transition from acute to chronic pain. We use our pain scale to measure the pain level in a mouse and then take a snapshot of the mouse’s brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We image the animals every day to find brain activity patterns that underlie the transition from acute to chronic pain. Once we find them, we can try to change them to alter the course of chronic pain. We’re interested in the emotional as well as sensory components of this pain.
> When we activated neurons through the skin on the mice’s backs, the animals behaved as if they were being stroked there. That launched the whole project. We did a lot more behavioral tests and traced the pathway for social touch from the skin to the spinal cord to the reward centers in the brain.
> What if we could turn on these neurons with a skin cream to improve mental health — say, to offset the harm caused by social isolation or to treat anxiety or depression? When I gave a talk about this in December, the psychiatrists and neuropharmacologists in the audience were very enthusiastic about the therapeutic potential.
> We’re also interested in them because mole rats do not feel some forms of pain. For example, they show no pain response to the molecule capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers, which is quite painful to most mammals. They have receptors in their skin that respond to capsaicin, so I hypothesize that the animals have brain pathways that shut down the pain. If we can find and tap into those signals, we might find a new way to block pain.
They are taking a multidisciplinary approach to researching an understudied field, and it's fascinating. Why is no-one else seeing that?