Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation in the body — it's an experience that is profoundly shaped by the brain. The same injury can produce very different levels of pain in different people, and even in the same person at different times.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is a lot like an alarm system. It's designed to get your attention, to make you do something. And if the alarm never turns off, that's exhausting — it wears you down. But here's the key insight: the alarm isn't the injury. The alarm is your brain's interpretation of signals from your body, and that interpretation can change.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us have encountered the idea of the bell curve. Average is the most common outcome. Very good or very bad outcomes are rarer. Extremely good or extremely bad outcomes are rarest of all. But Yadin Dudai says our emotional memories don't follow a bell curve — instead, they skew toward the extremes.

TED Radio Hour

Rethinking addiction in the age of Ozempic

GLP-1s might be telling us that there's some type of universal pathology when it comes to addiction, and that they are part of how we fix it. Now that is a tantalizing prospect, that there's a general purpose key that unlocks the path to moderation. But that's what GLP-1s seem like they could be, moderation molecules. They don't extinguish our desires, but they help us keep them in check.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation; it's also an emotion. And when you're in pain, your whole life can narrow down to that pain. It can make it harder to think, harder to connect with others, harder to find joy in activities that once brought pleasure.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Most people think of pain as a signal from the body — a warning that something is wrong. But Yoni Ashar and his colleagues found that for many people with chronic back pain, the signal had become decoupled from any actual tissue damage. The brain had learned to generate pain on its own, independent of what was happening in the body.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation — it's also a psychological experience. And that means the brain can sometimes be recruited to fight pain itself. Researchers have found that when people feel cared for or loved, when they feel a sense of meaning or purpose, or when they have a strong sense of control over their lives, they actually feel less pain.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain researchers have found that the experience of pain is heavily shaped by context, expectation, and meaning. The same injury can feel devastating in one situation and barely noticeable in another — soldiers wounded in battle, for instance, often report feeling little pain at the moment of injury, because the wound means they will be evacuated from the front lines.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain depends not just on the signals traveling from the body to the brain, but also on what the brain expects to feel. When the brain anticipates pain, it can amplify those signals — and when it doesn't, the very same injury can feel far less intense.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

When pain signals travel to the brain, the brain doesn't just passively receive that information — it actively decides how much attention to pay to it. This means that pain is not simply a readout of damage in the body; it's a construction of the mind.

Radiolab

Return of Alpha Gal

It made no sense: why couldn't she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades?

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation but an emotion, something produced by the brain in response to a complex set of inputs. And because pain is constructed by the brain, our mental states can shape and even control how much pain we experience.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a signal from the body — it's an experience constructed by the brain. And that means our thoughts, emotions, and expectations can powerfully shape how much pain we feel. In some cases, simply understanding that pain is not always a reliable indicator of tissue damage can itself reduce suffering.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

The problem is that we think of pain as something that just happens to us — a signal from the body that something is wrong. But the truth is more interesting. The brain is constantly making predictions about what it expects to feel, and those predictions shape what we actually experience.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Physicians themselves have had to grapple with the nature of pain. For much of medical history, pain was seen as a symptom — a signal from the body that something had gone wrong. But researchers have come to see that pain is more than a warning system. It is, in some ways, a construction of the mind.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

When you feel pain, a signal travels from the injured part of your body up through your nervous system. But the brain decides how much attention to pay to that signal. If the brain is occupied elsewhere — by a competing task or distraction — it can turn down the volume on pain.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a signal from damaged tissue — it's also a prediction. The brain is constantly trying to anticipate what's going to happen next, and pain is part of that predictive process. This means that pain can exist even in the absence of injury, and injury can exist without pain.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a sensation — it's an experience. And that experience is profoundly shaped by what we believe about our pain, what we think is causing it, and how we feel about it emotionally.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain is not just a physical sensation — it's also a psychological experience. And that means that the way we think about pain, the way we attend to it, the way we catastrophize about it or don't, can have a huge effect on how much we suffer.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Pain feels like a simple message from the body. If your elbow hurts, there must be something wrong with your elbow. If your back is painfully stiff, you need some work done on your back. But psychologist Rachel Zoffness says our minds play a much larger role in our experience of pain than many of us realize.

Hidden Brain

How to Combat Pain

Doctors typically treat pain with medications that target the body. But what if we thought about pain the way we think about mental illness, as something that arises in the mind and the body at the same time? Research suggests that simply believing your treatment will help can actually change how much pain you experience — and this effect is not imaginary.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

Most of us assume that our perception of the world is accurate — that we see things as they really are. But our brains are not cameras. They are prediction machines, constantly generating models of reality based on past experience, and then updating those models when new information arrives.

Hidden Brain

Changing Our Mental Maps

our brains actually navigate the world by coming up with mental maps. These maps act like an autopilot system, allowing us to navigate our lives more efficiently. But sometimes, they can lead us astray, leaving us stuck on a path of negativity and unhappiness.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decided that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

Radiolab

The Holy Shiver

Why does she get them in so many different situations? What's happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it — we face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.

TED Radio Hour

Tracking what your body needs

When we compare brain activity after movement versus after sitting, the differences are so striking. The brain after movement looks like one certainly far more ready to learn and to work, and yet somewhere along the way, we decide that sitting and staring in front of a computer screen for eight hours straight is the best way to work.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences — that sense of oneness, of feeling connected to something larger than themselves — tend to have a thicker cortex in certain brain regions. And this is true even after you control for whether someone goes to church or synagogue or mosque, or whether they believe in God.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences also tend to be healthier and happier. They show lower rates of depression and anxiety, less substance abuse, and they even tend to live longer. And it's not just that healthy, happy people have more time to go to church or temple — the spiritual experiences themselves seem to be driving these positive outcomes.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have a lot of awe in their lives tend to have lower levels of inflammatory cytokines, which are markers of stress and immune activation. Awe seems to quiet the self — that internal narrative we have about ourselves, our problems, our concerns — and when the self gets quieter, people tend to feel more connected to others and to the world around them.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier than those who do not. But psychologist Lisa Miller has found something even more surprising: the brains of spiritual people are actually structurally different from those who are not spiritual.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have what researchers call 'spiritual experiences' — states of overwhelming connection, awe, or transcendence — consistently show changes in a specific region of the brain called the parietal cortex. What's surprising is that damage to this region, whether from a stroke or a tumor, can actually cause people to become more spiritual, not less.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have frequent spiritual experiences tend to be healthier and happier. They report lower rates of depression and anxiety. They are less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol, less likely to be involved in domestic violence, and less likely to develop dementia in old age.

TED

What Sitting All Day Does to Your Brain and Body | Keith Diaz | TED

Over the course of sitting all day with no movement, people's mood plummets while their fatigue builds and builds. And that's because our muscles have a symbiotic relationship with our brains. They're in constant communication. Our biological need to contract muscle is more than just about physical health and metabolism. It's also foundational to mental and brain health.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

People who have more spiritual experiences also tend to have more activity in a particular brain network — a network that also lights up during other activities that draw our attention away from ourselves and toward other people, other beings, the wider world.

Hidden Brain

Waking Up Your Spiritual Brain: Part 1

Psychologist Lisa Miller says our brains also crave something else: transcendence. She suggests that spirituality is a universal human capacity, and that feeling connected to something larger than ourselves may be essential to a fulfilling life.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of emotional support as something we offer through words — by listening carefully, offering advice, or saying just the right thing. But researchers have found that simply being in the presence of someone who cares about us can reduce our experience of pain and stress, even when that person says nothing at all.

Radiolab

This is Your Brain on Hormones

each one of us is at the mercy of a crashing sea of chemicals inside of us – those things we call hormones

Radiolab

This is Your Brain on Hormones

Estrogen doesn't just regulate reproduction — it actively shapes how neurons form connections, how efficiently they communicate, and how resilient they are to stress and damage. When estrogen levels drop, as they do during menopause, women don't just lose a reproductive hormone; they lose a powerful neuroprotective agent.

Radiolab

This is Your Brain on Hormones

each one of us is at the mercy of a crashing sea of chemicals inside of us – those things we call hormones.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of emotional support as something we offer through words — by listening carefully, saying the right things, or giving advice. But researchers have found that simply being in the presence of someone we care about can regulate our nervous system, slow our heart rate, and reduce our sense of pain, even when that person says nothing at all.

Hidden Brain

Who Are You, Really?

For many of us, forgetting a name or losing your keys feels like a small failure. But what if forgetting is actually one of the most important things your brain does?

Hidden Brain

Unleashing Your Creativity

Most people think about creativity as something that just strikes you — like a bolt of lightning. But research suggests that creativity is less about sudden inspiration and more about the associations your brain makes between concepts. The more unusual and distant those associations, the more creative the idea.

EconTalk

Facing Death (with Sebastian Junger)

When Junger nearly died from a ruptured artery, he experienced something unexpected: he saw his dead father, and felt completely calm and unafraid. The experience didn't make him religious, but it made him think that the human brain may have evolved to make death easier — that the terror of dying may be much less than the terror of anticipating it.

TED Radio Hour

A neuroscientist's guide to managing our emotions

Our brain is like our very own Stradivarius. When our emotions are triggered out of proportions, that's akin to me trying to play a Stradivarius violin. It can cause enormous pain for both the player as well as those around us.

Book of the Day

To understand consciousness, Michael Pollan looked at plants, AI and himself

Sensience is kind of the base default case of having a certain awareness of your environment and a sense of the changes taking place in your environment and whether they're good for you or bad for you and then the ability to move toward the positive and away from the negative. Consciousness is kind of how we do sensience.