Your Brain Invents Pain. Here's Why.

Stubbing your toe feels like the pain is entirely in your foot. But the reality is far stranger... the agonising sensation you experience is actually a highly complex, constructed illusion, invented in real-time by your brain. In this episode of The Rest Is Science, Professor Hannah Fry and Michael Stevens (VSauce) explore the weird neuroscience of human pain and why pain is ultimately a brilliant evolutionary survival mechanism, how psychological state and the placebo effect can physically alter how much an injury hurts.-------------------For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research, breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit ⁠⁠https://cancerresearchuk.org/restisscience⁠⁠Cancer Research UK is a registered charity in England and Wales (1089464), Scotland (SC041666), the Isle of Man (1103) and Jersey (247). A company limited by guarantee. Registered company in England and Wales (4325234) and the Isle of Man (5713F). Registered address: 2 Redman Place, London, E20 1JQ.-------------------Find The Rest Is Science all over the internet by ⁠⁠clicking here.⁠⁠-------------------Video Producer: Adam Thornton + Oli Oakley + Jack MeekAnimator: Sam BensonVideo & Social: Bex TyrrellAssistant Producer: Lucy LipscombeProducer: Simona RataSenior Producer: Lauren Armstrong-CarterHead Of Digital: Samuel OakleyExec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hannah Fry?

  Welcome to The Rest Is Science. I'm Hannah Fry.

• 0:03Michael Stevens?

  And I'm Michael Stevens.

• 0:04Hannah Fry?

  Okay, Michael, what's the worst pain you've ever been in?

• 0:07Michael Stevens?

  Oh goodness. I think it was when I was mowing a yard and a piece of sand scratched my cornea.

• 0:14Hannah Fry?

  Ooh.

• 0:15Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. I mean, it was bearable. It wasn't like childbirth, you know, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that I thought it would get better and it didn't all evening. So I had to go to the hospital and they like immediately put this special pain relieving eye drop in. But that was bad.

• 0:29Hannah Fry?

  So as soon as you had the pain relief, it was kind of okay?

• 0:32Michael Stevens?

  Totally fine. It was so weird. In fact, the doctor wouldn't give me more to take home because he was like, people use this and then they can't even tell that their eyes are damaged. And so it's like dangerous.

• 0:42Hannah Fry?

  Right. People do talk about childbirth being one of the most painful things you can experience, but it's not the most painful.

• 0:48Michael Stevens?

  What is the most painful?

• 0:49Hannah Fry?

  Well, there is a condition which actually my ex-husband had, which are known as suicide headaches.

• 0:56Michael Stevens?

  Oh, like the ice pick headaches? I have heard that people who have given birth and had these kinds of headaches say the headaches are worse.

• 1:05Hannah Fry?

  Absolutely.

• 1:06Michael Stevens?

  He had them.

• 1:07Hannah Fry?

  He had them, yeah. And when he would have them, I mean, you really knew that he was in absolute agony. Essentially, the reason why they are called, I mean, it's an awful, awful phrase, but historically, these things are so, so catastrophically painful. It feels like a buildup of pressure in your head, but I think in particular, it's the nerve in your face, the trigeminal nerve that is really irritated, that's an understatement, is really under extreme pressure and pain when all of this is happening. And historically, because there was no real access to pain relief, people would be in such excruciating pain that they would try and take their own lives just to escape it.

• 1:47Michael Stevens?

  Wow.

• 1:48Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. I mean, thankfully, that puts childbirth in perspective really, doesn't it? It is a bit annoying when you then go on to have children with people who suffer from suicide headaches because they're never sympathetic. No sympathy whatsoever. Okay, today, Michael, we're going to be talking about pain. I'm going to see your level of pain that you can tolerate.

• 2:09Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Hannah Fry?

  We're going to talk about people who feel nothing and what that does to them. And we are going to talk about the underlying question under all of it. Can we make the pain go away?

• 2:26Michael Stevens?

  This episode is brought to you by Cancer Research UK.

• 2:29Hannah Fry?

  Scientists have found that cancer risks usually increase with age and size, but some species defy the odds.

• 2:36Michael Stevens?

  For example, deep sea Greenland sharks. They can grow over six metres long, weigh more than a small car, and yet live for up to 400 years.

• 2:46Hannah Fry?

  Now, understanding how Greenland sharks' cellular repair and immune systems seem to have managed to keep them cancer-free for centuries, that could open up exciting research pathways.

• 2:57Michael Stevens?

  Essentially, over millions of years, evolution has been running the world's most successful cancer prevention trial. And sometimes breakthroughs can be found in unusual places.

• 3:08Hannah Fry?

  So by exploring the unexpected, Cancer Research UK scientists are uncovering new ways to tackle over 200 types of cancer. Their work has helped to double survival in the UK over the last 50 years and continues to save and improve lives around the world.

• 3:24Michael Stevens?

  For more information about Cancer Research UK, their research and breakthroughs and how you can support them, visit cancerresearchuk.org/the rest is science.

• 3:36Speaker 02

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• 4:20Speaker 02

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• 4:34Hannah Fry?

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• 4:40Speaker 03

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• 5:24Speaker 03

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• 5:40Hannah Fry?

  Okay, Michael, I have asked you to prepare something here.

• 5:43Michael Stevens?

  You've asked me to prepare. I've got a bowl of water here, and I'm gonna put ice in it.

• 5:46Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 5:47Michael Stevens?

  I've got the world's tiniest ice tray.

• 5:50Hannah Fry?

  It'll be all right.

• 5:51Michael Stevens?

  Should be okay. I'll crack these in.

• 5:54Michael Stevens?

  Ah, yeah.

• 5:55Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so what we're gonna do in a moment is we're gonna plunge our hands into these ice bowls. I also have one here, by the way, pre-prepared. It's an opaque bowl, but you can just about see in the bottom, those of you who are watching, there's, I would say substantially more ice than in Michael's.

• 6:10Michael Stevens?

  Okay, yeah, I'm afraid I don't have enough ice. This is all I have.

• 6:14Hannah Fry?

  It'll be fine. It'll be fine. You'll just look like absolute nails, Michael.

• 6:17Michael Stevens?

  I'm gonna look so strong. I mean, we should let it cool down the water a bit. This was already very cold water.

• 6:22Hannah Fry?

  This is actually a standard way that researchers can measure pain thresholds in people. Some people are much more able to sustain holding their hand in the sort of the extreme burning sensation that you get when your hand is in real cold. Incidentally, actually, redheads, the research is developing here that redheads feel pain in a different way to other non-mutants like yourself.

• 6:48Michael Stevens?

  Now, I've heard that. I've heard that. They don't feel pain. They have to be anesthetized differently.

• 6:54Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 6:54Michael Stevens?

  But you're saying they feel it in a different way or just a different magnitude?

• 6:58Hannah Fry?

  Different magnitude. I think that they have a slightly higher tolerance to pain.

• 7:03Michael Stevens?

  Interesting.

• 7:03Hannah Fry?

  But takes more to knock them out. So we're gonna see, we're gonna both plunge our hands into this. While I tell you about the other experiments that they do to cause people pain. And we're gonna test, Michael, we're gonna, we're gonna see who can hold it in longer, you or me, before the pain gets too extreme.

• 7:16Michael Stevens?

  Okay.

• 7:17Hannah Fry?

  All right, you ready?

• 7:18Michael Stevens?

  I'm ready.

• 7:19Hannah Fry?

  Okay, let's do this. Let's do this.

• 7:21Michael Stevens?

  Count me down. Oh, you're in.

• 7:22Hannah Fry?

  I'm in, I'm in. Three, two, one, go. Okay, you've gone for a flat hand. I've gone for, I'm maybe trying to cheat slightly by tucking my thumb in into a fist. But we'll see, it's already, I'll be honest, quite cold.

• 7:34Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, mine's cold. I should have more ice.

• 7:36Hannah Fry?

  It's okay.

• 7:37Michael Stevens?

  It's okay. This isn't scientific. This is just a little challenge. It is uncomfortable.

• 7:42Hannah Fry?

  It is already uncomfortable for me too. I want to tell you though, while our hands are in here, you can hold it in for about three minutes or so before it really becomes absolutely unbearable. Also, be careful about doing this at home because you can genuinely give yourself, give yourself ice burns. But the way that people use this in research around pain is that you establish an individual person's baseline. And then what you can do is you can adapt it. So you can see, can they hold in their hand for longer when they're swearing, for example? The answer, by the way, is yes.

• 8:13Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Hannah Fry?

  Do they want to take their hand out earlier when they are feeling particularly stressed, for example? The answer is yes. But researchers for a really long time have tried to come up with different ways to ethically subject people to pain. This is one of the kind of older, more traditional methods, but there is this new one that people are using, which I think is really interesting. It's something that was sort of discovered as a way to research pain by a guy called Frederick Lindstedt. And what he was doing, he was at home, he wondered what would happen if he got a pack of frankfurters out of the fridge. And took half the pack of frankfurters and microwaved them and then left the others

• 8:57Hannah Fry?

  at a sort of, you know, quite cold temperature, sort of five degrees centigrade. And then he arranged them on a plate where it would be one at forty degrees, one at five degrees, one at forty, one at five, one at forty, one at five, sort of interchange them. And then laid a flat palm across all of the frankfurters. Now, I noticed you said, ah, when I mentioned this, have you come across this before?

• 9:19Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, the thermal grill illusion. We did it with hot dogs on an episode of Mindfield.

• 9:23Hannah Fry?

  I did you.

• 9:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. It's painful and why don't you tell us why? How, how are you feeling right now, by the way, in the ice?

• 9:30Hannah Fry?

  I would say I'm enjoying the distraction of talking about hot dogs.

• 9:33Michael Stevens?

  Okay, well, keep going.

• 9:34Hannah Fry?

  How are you? Is it hurting yet?

• 9:36Michael Stevens?

  It does hurt, but it's not bad enough. It's getting worse. I mean, my ice is almost all melted already. I've made it very easy for myself by just not being an Iceman.

• 9:47Hannah Fry?

  You're gonna look like an absolute superhero. Um, I would say, I think the tucked thumb has definitely helped me here.

• 9:55Michael Stevens?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:55Hannah Fry?

  The outside of my hand is like, is really, if I, especially if I concentrate on it, it's really, really burning a lot. And this is the thing, this is part of the reason why the Frankfurt thing ends up hurting because actually really intense cold water, it doesn't register in your body as like very cold, it registers almost as burning, it sort of feels the same sensation as burning. And the reason is because it activates this pain pathway that your brain reads as a burning sensation. So your skin is effectively got two different receptors that are running up to the brain. One of them is like a cool reporter and this one says, okay, it's fine, there's nothing to worry about. It's not unbelievably cold, it's cool, so you don't need to worry about it. And then the other one is a burning alarm, right? That's like, ouch, get this away.

• 10:40Hannah Fry?

  Suddenly my hand actually hurts way more than I'm saying than burning. But that cold can also trip this, right? So extreme hot or extreme cold will trip this sort of burning alarm. So what happens with this illusion is that the warm hot dogs, the warm frankfurters, tell your brain, hey, look, this is definitely not cool. Because it's warm, right? It's not like, if you just held the five degree frankfurter, your brain would not trigger the burning alarm because it would say it's cool. So it's fine. It's no big deal. It's not super freezing. But because the warm ones are there, they stop that trigger from happening. So your brain doesn't get the message that this is an okay temperature. And so only the burning sensation appears in your brain.

• 11:25Hannah Fry?

  If I explain that, I mean, you you give it a go. Maybe you'll be able to explain it better than me.

• 11:28Michael Stevens?

  I haven't looked into this recently. I've heard that it's like you've got hot and cold receptors. And obviously, they don't go off together ever. Unless there is excruciating urgent pain. And so if you can line the the cold and warm hot dogs up close together in a line and put your hand or your arm on them, your brain's getting a signal from both cold and warm receptors. And that's only that only happens when you're like literally having your arm cut off.

• 11:55Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 11:56Michael Stevens?

  It hurts so badly.

• 11:58Hannah Fry?

  And does it? Because I've never done it. Does it really hurt?

• 12:00Michael Stevens?

  I actually did not do it.

• 12:02Hannah Fry?

  Oh.

• 12:02Michael Stevens?

  And I regret this. We did it on Rosanna Pansino. We had her come on. And she like couldn't keep her hand on it. I don't know why I didn't try it. I think it's because I was the host and we were filming.

• 12:12Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 12:12Michael Stevens?

  But they have an apparatus at the Exploratorium in San Francisco that uses metal rods that are thinner and it's more effective. And I've always wanted to try that one. I also want to build one and put it in the curiosity box. So you can like hurt. Are you giving up?

• 12:25Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Do you know, it's so strange because it's noticeable that when you are talking about excruciating pain, it hurts so much more than when you're talking about, I don't know, like going to visit an exploratorium.

• 12:38Michael Stevens?

  Mysteries and a fireplace. Does that help you?

• 12:41Hannah Fry?

  It does. It does.

• 12:42Michael Stevens?

  If I give you some like math to do, some some just like algebra equations.

• 12:46Hannah Fry?

  I'm warm blooded for maths. Yes, I'm absolutely fine with it. Do you know what? I think I'm giving up. It's moving up my arm now.

• 12:53Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no.

• 12:53Hannah Fry?

  Moving up my arm. I think I'm giving up. I don't know how long I lasted. About three minutes, I reckon, probably.

• 12:59Michael Stevens?

  More than three minutes. It's at least at least seven minutes.

• 13:03Hannah Fry?

  Oh, I can't feel my hand.

• 13:04Michael Stevens?

  More like maybe six minutes. That's good. I feel like this wasn't a fair test. My ice, it's all melted by now. I have no ice left. So I've melted all that ice.

• 13:13Hannah Fry?

  You're just having a tepid bath.

• 13:15Michael Stevens?

  It's not tepid, but I think that at this point, it's like a, maybe a one or a two out of 10 pain wise.

• 13:22Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 13:23Michael Stevens?

  Actually, I'm more uncomfortable from holding my hand in this position. So I didn't do a good demonstration and I lost. I lost my, my dozen ice cubes. So warm drinks for me today. I mean, I can keep my hand in just to prove myself, but there's no ice left. It's only going to warm.

• 13:42Hannah Fry?

  I think you do the rest of this episode with dry hands.

• 13:44Michael Stevens?

  Okay, it's coming out.

• 13:47Michael Stevens?

  When we're in person, we'll perhaps thermometers, we'll do this with lots of ice, same temperature, and we'll really see who can take more pain.

• 13:54Hannah Fry?

  We'll see if the ginger really is talking a big game. I think if it felt more competitive as well, I think that that would sort of overtake. I would want to stay in even longer. Here's the thing though. Okay. So the reason why that sausage experiment is so interesting is that actually you're not in pain, you're not in danger, you're not hurting, you are perfectly safe. You could hold a 40 degree hot dog and be fine. You can hold a five degree hot dog and be fine. What that demonstrates is that pain is not this faithful read out of damage. It's a verdict that your brain is constructing. And actually sometimes just plain wrong. Do you know where the word pain comes from, by the way?

• 14:34Michael Stevens?

  No, I don't.

• 14:35Hannah Fry?

  It goes back to Latin, unsurprisingly. Poeina.

• 14:39Michael Stevens?

  Ah.

• 14:40Hannah Fry?

  Which is penalty or punishment. Also in the Greek, poenii, which is blood money. And it's sort of like the price that you pay for, for spilled blood.

• 14:51Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 14:52Hannah Fry?

  But underneath all of it, it's like the root of the word pain is to pay to kind of atone. It's like pain is sort of a debt that you are paying.

• 15:01Michael Stevens?

  Interesting. You know, my mother's maiden name was Payne.

• 15:05Hannah Fry?

  Oh, really?

• 15:06Michael Stevens?

  Now you guys can all steal my bank monies.

• 15:10Hannah Fry?

  Wait, spelled how?

• 15:11Michael Stevens?

  Spelled P A Y N E. Like Thomas Payne, common sense. Anyway, so pain is a punishment, but nowadays it looks more like it's a, a verdict. Our brain comes to, I think that's a great word to use, verdict. It looks at the evidence and it just kind of has to come up with a decision and it might be wrong.

• 15:31Hannah Fry?

  Even in other words that are to do with pain, like excruciating. Excruciating has the word sort of crux, as in the cross, right? Like the crucifix hidden inside it.

• 15:41Michael Stevens?

  Right. Oh, wow. Yeah.

• 15:44Hannah Fry?

  And I think that like people have always filed pain under this, this idea of it being a curse or a sentence. And now, because as you say, actually, we know that it's a verdict because we know that it's not sort of a direct reading of your environment. In two thousand and twenty, the official definition of pain changed. Pain is now defined as associated with or resembling that which is associated with actual or potential tissue damage.

• 16:14Michael Stevens?

  Huh.

• 16:14Hannah Fry?

  And this is an important distinction because there are some people who actually have really serious chronic pain in their bodies without there being the tissue damage or the underlying physical cause that can be treated to, to cut the pain off.

• 16:31Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. My hand is still very cold. Yours must be so cold still. I, I was sitting on it and now I've got it in my, um, leg pit. The other side of my knee. I don't know. What is that called?

• 16:43Hannah Fry?

  Instead of an armpit.

• 16:45Michael Stevens?

  Yeah. The crook of your arm, the crook of my leg, I'm like squeezing it. See, look how hairy my legs are. That's, gives you a sense of how warm I am all the time.

• 16:56Hannah Fry?

  Insulation all over the place. Right. Shall I give you some quick pain facts?

• 16:59Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, please do.

• 17:00Hannah Fry?

  So no perception is essentially your perception of pain.

• 17:05Michael Stevens?

  That's a great word, by the way. No perception.

• 17:08Hannah Fry?

  Isn't it good?

• 17:09Michael Stevens?

  Is there any perception? No perception.

• 17:11Hannah Fry?

  There is none, none at all. So no perception, that's your sensory nervous system, is the process of actually detecting and encoding pain stimuli. And it's not the same thing as pain. No perception is, is like the raw signal that is kind of traveling up the nerves and the pain is what your brain decides to do with it.

• 17:33Michael Stevens?

  Ah, it's the equalia of it all.

• 17:36Hannah Fry?

  Right, totally. Cause you can have the signal with no pain, right? Under anesthesia, your body is like cut wide open. These signals are definitely firing towards your brain, but you're not, you're not registering it. And you can have the reverse. You can have pain with no signal. So people who have had limbs. Amputated, for instance, can end up feeling phantom pain for limbs that are no longer there.

• 17:57Michael Stevens?

  Right, right, true.

• 17:58Hannah Fry?

  So the two things are not, it's not like a one to one thing, but in terms of that signal, that nervous system signal that travels through your body. I'm sure that you will have noticed this just by like stubbing your toe. There were two different pain signals. If you hit your thumb with a hammer, dink, for example, then you get like a very precise jab. It's like ouch, very quickly, like pull your hand away. Sort of if you put your hand on a hot hob, for instance, as well, that's the other one. Incredibly quick signal. That is going through these fibers that travel to your brain at twenty meters per second. But the dull pain that you get after you pulled your hand away from being hit by a hammer.

• 18:38Hannah Fry?

  Or like if you stub your toe, for instance, these are your C fibers and they move at one meter per second. So actually, I always think about when I stub my toe, I really noticed this, stub my toe, and then I sort of in my head, I'm like, one, two. There it is. And that's literally the pain signal physically traveling up your body and into your brain.

• 19:02Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it it has a different speed. I made a little YouTube short about the speed of pain before. Both of these kinds of pain have their own purposes. That initial urgent fast pain is like move, it makes you move away or stop. But then the slower throbbing pain that lasts longer is there to keep reminding you to tenderly treat the injured. Part of your body.

• 19:27Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, don't ignore it. I tell you where you don't get those pain receptors, which is in your brain where the actual pain is constructed overall.

• 19:34Michael Stevens?

  Oh, funny. Yeah.

• 19:35Hannah Fry?

  Even when you have a headache, it's not your brain that's hurting at all. It's sort of the surrounding of your brain. I mean, you see this with brain surgery.

• 19:43Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, right. So if someone said, I'm gonna torture you by stabbing right where you feel pain, you wouldn't feel it.

• 19:50Hannah Fry?

  You wouldn't feel it because there's no pain receptors in your brain.

• 19:53Michael Stevens?

  That is a weird thing, by the way, that I want to look into more. So first of all, we've all seen like, I don't know if we all have, but open brain surgery. Is so weird because the person doesn't have to be under anesthesia. There's like local anesthesia for where their skull has been cut in the in the flesh. But then you can just poke around, slice around, ask them like, okay, so can you still feel your fingers? And they're like, yep. And they're like, okay, I guess you don't need that part of your brain. I don't think that's exactly how it goes.

• 20:20Hannah Fry?

  Surgery by Vsauce.

• 20:22Michael Stevens?

  What I, that's how I would do it. What I've, I would use an obsidian knife though, by the way.

• 20:27Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, thank you.

• 20:28Michael Stevens?

  That's a call out to a previous episode or an episode to come, depending on the editor's schedules. But I've always wondered about the feeling of mental exhaustion and what causes that. It's not pain, but it is a feeling we have where if you have been very focused for a long time, if you've been thinking a lot, you feel like you've used your head. Is that because you've actually been using your eyes a lot? What is that feeling? It's not pain, but our brains don't have nerves in them that give us feedback on like how it's doing. Is it hurting? So what's up with mental exhaustion as a feeling?

• 21:03Hannah Fry?

  So I don't know the answer to that for sure, right? And maybe there's going to be people in the comments who know way more about this than than I do. But, but one thing I will say, have you ever come across the electrical current stimulators that you wear on your head?

• 21:14Michael Stevens?

  The EEG nets?

• 21:16Hannah Fry?

  No, no, this is um.

• 21:18Michael Stevens?

  Oh, it's a stimulator?

• 21:20Hannah Fry?

  Yeah. Okay, so here's this idea, right? Is that actually what's going on in your head when you're thinking? And actually, when you're feeling pain, I mean, pretty much everything that you sort of sense in your body, what's happening is that charged particles are moving around.

• 21:33Michael Stevens?

  Sure, yeah.

• 21:34Hannah Fry?

  One of the theories, I guess, is that exhaustion, but also things like depression, are really amplified by there just not being enough charged particles in the right place.

• 21:47Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 21:48Hannah Fry?

  So anyway, I have this thing, I have this headset that I wear sometimes. It sounds crazy, but it's actually, it's FDA approved, it's like used by the NHS. And it just applies this very small electrical current on your head. And then suddenly your brain fog just goes away, like suddenly you actually.

• 22:08Michael Stevens?

  Well, you gotta show it to me. Where is it? Go get it.

• 22:10Hannah Fry?

  If I can get it.

• 22:11Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  A few moments later.

• 22:14Hannah Fry?

  It's like this little headset.

• 22:16Michael Stevens?

  Ah, okay.

• 22:19Hannah Fry?

  The thing is, this is a medical device, right? You sort of have to do it under supervision of a doctor.

• 22:23Michael Stevens?

  So how did you get it?

• 22:25Hannah Fry?

  From a doctor.

• 22:26Michael Stevens?

  Right, okay, so you said, hey, my charged particles just aren't flowing.

• 22:30Hannah Fry?

  My charged particles aren't flowing, hit me up. And this has a bit of a reputation, these kind of things, because, you know, in the nineteen fifty's, sixty's, seventy's, electric shock therapy was really dramatic and I think quite unethical in a lot of the ways that they used it. But this is, I were talking like really gentle and it's just about sort of, so you get a little, there's a slight difference in current between one end to the other end, you've got an anode and a cathode.

• 22:53Michael Stevens?

  So how does it affect inside your skull? Is it like the electric field, like almost a magnet or?

• 23:01Hannah Fry?

  I mean, essentially, everything that's going on in your neurons is about charged particles moving from one place to another.

• 23:09Michael Stevens?

  Right, yeah, squirting around, different concentrations of sodium ions.

• 23:13Hannah Fry?

  Exactly, so what this thing does is it changes the resting membrane potential of the neurons.

• 23:22Michael Stevens?

  Uh huh, so could it be dangerous if misused?

• 23:26Hannah Fry?

  I mean, probably, I think like, I think there's very good evidence about this thing. It's also, by the way, an incredibly low electrical current, like you couldn't even feel it really if you put your fingers on it. But the idea is that you just give your brain a bit of a head start and then over time you sort of build new pathways.

• 23:43Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so you've had good results from it.

• 23:45Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, I really like it, I really like it.

• 23:47Michael Stevens?

  How often do you use it?

• 23:48Hannah Fry?

  Five times a week.

• 23:49Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow, so every, every day, except on the weekends where you just let your brain.

• 23:53Hannah Fry?

  Chill out, chill out and deionize.

• 23:55Michael Stevens?

  Deionize, what is it called?

• 23:58Hannah Fry?

  Transcranial direct current stimulation.

• 24:00Michael Stevens?

  Oh, interesting, I've done transcranial magnetic stimulation on minefield.

• 24:05Hannah Fry?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:05Michael Stevens?

  In a lab where they try to change how your neurons are working, specifically in Broca's area, just to demonstrate that they can stop you from being able to speak. And this also has a lot of therapeutic uses, so it sounds like what you have is a like at home version

• 24:21Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Michael Stevens?

  of that technology.

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• 26:32Hannah Fry?

  Here's the thing, though, all thinking and feeling that's going on in your body is essentially these charged ions passing through different channels. I mean, that's, they're sort of squirting around your body, right? That's essentially what's happening. The way that pain works, we know this now, the way that you feel pain is that at the tip of every pain nerve is this little tiny gate that the ions sort of get squirted through, this like little sodium channel, and it's called NAV 1.7. It might be that people call it NAV, but I'm gonna call it NAV 1.7. So if that gate is open, then the little ions get squirted through and get up to your brain and you're like, oh, I feel pain, ouch. But

• 27:14Hannah Fry?

  if that gate is blocked or sort of modified in some way that stops the ions being allowed to pass through, then you would feel no pain. You would still have sensation, you would still be able to like feel and touch things, but you would have no pain whatsoever. And it turns out that there is a gene, it's called SCN9a, there is a mutation in that gene that marks up this particular little gate and means that there are some people who can feel no pain whatsoever.

• 27:47Michael Stevens?

  Wow. I've read fictional accounts of people with such a condition in the Flowers in the Attic series when I was a kid.

• 27:55Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 27:56Michael Stevens?

  There's a child in like the second books and on who doesn't feel pain. And so they always have to be so careful because this kid won't know if they've scratched themselves, they can get an infection, they won't know if they've broken a bone.

• 28:09Hannah Fry?

  I've met someone with this condition.

• 28:12Michael Stevens?

  Really?

• 28:12Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, he's called Stephen Pete. He is so amazing, American guy, has worked with researchers who are trying to like isolate this particular pathway, try and work out if there's different pain medication. He was so amazing, but I have to confess to you, it's the only time I've ever interviewed someone where I had to pause the interview midway through to go and be sick. I had to vomit because it was so horrific, the stuff that he was telling me, I couldn't handle it. And I basically threw up in the middle of the interview.

• 28:42Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow. The only time I've ever actually felt really sick and I had to excuse myself was when I was at Berkeley looking at actual human brains. And I pretended like it was the formaldehyde smell that made me sick. And I'm like, I gotta go. I got too big of a whiff. But really, it was the idea that I was holding someone's identity.

• 29:04Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 29:05Michael Stevens?

  Everything they'd felt, every memory, every time they'd taken a child to the playground. It all happened in this organ that we don't understand and I was holding it. We were just looking at it and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is too, too close to a human.

• 29:19Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 29:19Michael Stevens?

  So there's my admission that it wasn't the formaldehyde.

• 29:22Hannah Fry?

  Yeah, wow. You're right. It's incredibly profound.

• 29:24Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so his name is Steven Pete.

• 29:26Hannah Fry?

  Steven Pete, yeah.

• 29:27Michael Stevens?

  Talk about a mondegreen. That also sounds like it's two people, Steve and Pete.

• 29:31Hannah Fry?

  It's true, Steven Pete.

• 29:32Michael Stevens?

  People do that to me, Michael Stevens. And they're like, so is your name Steven or Michael? And I'm like, you, you can see there, it says Stevens. No one's first name is Stevens. If my name was Michael Steven, then maybe I'd get it. But this happens to me every time, not every time, but a lot.

• 29:49Hannah Fry?

  I think you're a better Michael than a Steve.

• 29:51Michael Stevens?

  If I had a son, I told my wife, I really wanted Steve Stevens. I did meet a guy whose name was Steven Michaels. He's a brilliant musical performer, performed at my daughter's preschool years ago. And I'm like, dude, Steven Michaels, I gotta tell you, my name is Michael Stevens. And he was like, oh, that's neat. Later. And I was like, no, but wait, we're, we're destined.

• 30:08Hannah Fry?

  We're destined to be together.

• 30:10Michael Stevens?

  What, where'd you go?

• 30:12Hannah Fry?

  Oh, that's good. I like that. I have two friends. A gay couple who are both called Emma, which I really enjoy. And they've got a little daughter. To the daughter, it's like, oh, what's your mommy called? Oh, my mommy's called Emma. And my mommy's called Emma. I just really like that a lot.

• 30:27Michael Stevens?

  Oh, wow. Yes.

• 30:29Hannah Fry?

  I think Michael Stevens and Steven Michaels, you could have been the most beautiful gay romance story. That would have been so lovely.

• 30:36Michael Stevens?

  What would we have called our kid? Because there's only those two permutations of two things.

• 30:41Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 30:41Michael Stevens?

  We'll figure that out later.

• 30:42Hannah Fry?

  Anyway, okay, I'm going to tell you some of the stuff that Steven Pete told me. Okay, but I'm, I'm editing this very heavily, obviously, because I don't want you to throw up during this.

• 30:49Michael Stevens?

  First, I want to say cycle meevens, that could work, or.

• 30:54Hannah Fry?

  Then me?

• 30:55Michael Stevens?

  Maybe that one, if we wind up having a second.

• 30:57Hannah Fry?

  I think you should have Steven Stevens and Michael Michaels.

• 31:00Michael Stevens?

  That would be good, especially if they were twins. But how do you change the last name of your own child?

• 31:05Hannah Fry?

  You can do whatever you want.

• 31:07Michael Stevens?

  You can do whatever you want. Well, not everything you want. I did a video on this. There are names that you aren't allowed.

• 31:12Hannah Fry?

  Sure.

• 31:12Michael Stevens?

  You know what? Funny enough, a name is a human right. The UN has said that a name is a right that you have as a human. So yeah, it's a human rights abuse to not name children.

• 31:23Hannah Fry?

  Wow. Yeah, I mean, it's legal requirement, right?

• 31:25Michael Stevens?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:26Hannah Fry?

  Should I tell you some of the stuff that he, um, he told me? Because the thing is, is that this whole idea of not feeling pain, especially if you live with chronic pain, I think it feels like, oh, this would be such a blessing, but it is the most horrific curse, the most horrific curse. So they found out that he had this condition when he was a baby and he was teething. I mean, as I was talking to him, I sort of noticed that his speech was impaired slightly.

• 31:50Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 31:51Hannah Fry?

  And, um, basically what had happened when he was teething was he had bitten off a chunk of his own tongue and not even realized. They diagnosed him by holding an open flame underneath his foot and he didn't flinch. Like, this is a little baby, right? Keeping a toddler safe, full stop, is quite difficult, but like when they're not feeling pain. He would sort of use it as a way to get what he wanted. So if his parents, you know, as a teenager were like, you need to do this, he'd be like, mm hmm, and would sort of sit there and break his fingers just to.

• 32:20Michael Stevens?

  Oh, no. Wow.

• 32:22Hannah Fry?

  The mortality rate of people with this particular mutation is incredibly high. Lots of them die in childhood, particularly historically. And if not, you know, in their teenage years, it's really, really, really not nice. You know, if you want real proof of like the fact that, that not having any pain at all is like such a horrific curse. Leprosy, which people had historically thought was a condition which rotted flesh. Actually, in the 1940s, there was a surgeon called Paul Brand, who discovered that actually that's not what it is at all. All it does is a bacteria that kills the nerves. So means that you cannot feel pain. And thus it's your own actions effectively that mean that you lose toes, you lose fingers.

• 33:05Hannah Fry?

  These are self inflicted wounds that are unfelt essentially. It's a really horrible story about. About him going to India to a leper's colony to sort of study people. And at nighttime, he would have to stay up to sort of fight the rats away from kind of chewing on people who were asleep because they just couldn't feel it. They couldn't feel the pain.

• 33:25Michael Stevens?

  Whoa, I didn't know that about leprosy.

• 33:27Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 33:28Michael Stevens?

  I know that there's like wet and dry leprosy, or at least that's what they were called back at the time of Papillon. Have you ever seen that movie?

• 33:34Hannah Fry?

  No.

• 33:35Michael Stevens?

  Oh, there's a really cool scene where Papillon, an escaped prisoner, is trying to find a safe harbor. And he comes to a leper colony and they're going to kick him out and they're like, we'll let you stay if you smoke from my cigar. So the idea is like, oh, it's contagious. He's gonna, but he grabs the cigar anyway and he smokes from it. And gives it back. And the guy goes, how did you know that I didn't have contagious wet leprosy? And Papillon goes, I didn't. I'm just that desperate.

• 34:01Hannah Fry?

  It's just worth the gamble.

• 34:02Michael Stevens?

  For you to protect me. Yeah, it's a very cool scene.

• 34:05Hannah Fry?

  So hold on, wet leprosy is contagious and dry is not?

• 34:08Michael Stevens?

  That's at least what I learned from the movie.

• 34:10Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 34:10Michael Stevens?

  And I have not looked deeper into it, but I do think it is true that there is a contagious and non-contagious version.

• 34:16Hannah Fry?

  But I mean, it's a bacteria that causes it. So presumably, I mean, it's not particularly prevalent disease, at least in the Western world now, right? It's not something that you have to particularly be concerned about.

• 34:24Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, I haven't run into it. Oh, you're right. Yeah. Nerve damage may result in the loss of nociception.

• 34:30Hannah Fry?

  There you go.

• 34:32Michael Stevens?

  Let me just look up contagiousness.

• 34:34Hannah Fry?

  Hmm.

• 34:35Michael Stevens?

  Okay, so all I'm seeing here is that leprosy is not highly contagious. They can live with their families and attend school and work. This is right from Wikipedia. So I don't know if there's two different kinds. All I know is that in the movie Papillon and maybe also in the novel.

• 34:51Hannah Fry?

  Slash documentary.

• 34:53Michael Stevens?

  It was supposed to be a bit of a documentary. It's based on the guy's life story that he wrote. But anyway, pain. So I didn't know leprosy was related to the loss of nociception.

• 35:04Hannah Fry?

  I mean, the main thing that I know about leprosy is from being a Catholic, right? Because boy, do they talk about it a lot in the Bible.

• 35:11Michael Stevens?

  A lot of people get it. Yeah.

• 35:12Hannah Fry?

  A lot of people get it in the Bible. There's something really interesting here, which is that when you look at the origin of the word pain, it's like a curve. But actually, the real curse is not having it at all.

• 35:23Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 35:24Hannah Fry?

  The sort of perception of what pain is and what it is kind of doing for us. Not only that has changed, but like how you could measure it itself. Because there have been people who've been like, right, well, let's just create a scale here. Let's just create numbers where ten means something, a particular type of pain, and then we'll just be able to, everyone will be able to scale it, right? So there was the doll orometer, which is a lamp that would focus on a sort of blackened patch of forehead. And then the idea was that there would be like a unit of agony, the doll, scale naught to ten point five. Which is, I think, frankly, upsetting that there goes to ten point five.

• 36:04Hannah Fry?

  At eight dolls, it would leave second degree burns on the skin. But it was just a bit all over the place. And what they tried to do, they tried to calibrate this with different people. They would go in when people were in labor, when women were in labor. They would go in an in-between contractions. They would try and like burn their hands.

• 36:22Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 36:23Hannah Fry?

  And ask how it compares. It's like, well, what hurts more? This or or the actual childbirth.

• 36:28Michael Stevens?

  How many dolls are you feeling right now?

• 36:30Hannah Fry?

  How many dolls? And I'm quoting here, one subject became so hostile. Which you would, that they they abandoned her. Anyway, the point is, they tried this, right? But the numbers never reproduced. They couldn't find, they couldn't manage to extract like a certain level of heat that then correlates to a certain number on the scale.

• 36:49Michael Stevens?

  No, it would it would depend way too much on the set and setting. You know, like, like we've said, if someone was more stressed, they're going to feel it differently than if they're focused or or chill. It's gonna matter whether their hair is red or not, apparently.

• 37:04Hannah Fry?

  Right, but the point that you just made about how you're feeling being such this integral key part of it, it is, as it turns out, almost all of the story.

• 37:18Hannah Fry?

  Is what's going on in your head. There was like some early indications of this when people were studying this, particularly during war settings, right? So like in World War Two, there'd be soldiers who had these catastrophic wounds, who are kind of getting up and walking around and like apparently feeling nothing. And there is actually a physical mechanism that can cause that. So there is this kind of descending control system. So it's not that you just have pain happens here, it goes straight to your brain. Actually, you kind of have this gateway through the spinal cord. And what can happen is your body can effectively like close the gates in the spinal cord before you've ever actually felt anything. This, this by the way, is one of the reasons why if you have a kid who falls over and then

• 38:00Hannah Fry?

  you're like, oh, rub your knee, right? You can actually help because if you have like a harmless touch, then it can help to confuse the signal and basically stop it reaching your brain. It kind of closes the gate when it gets to your, when it gets to your spinal column.

• 38:14Michael Stevens?

  That makes sense.

• 38:15Hannah Fry?

  But there is some amazing research in Oxford University by Irene Tracey, who I've gone to go and meet. She's amazing, by the way. She is known as the queen of pain. What a title.

• 38:26Michael Stevens?

  What a great title.

• 38:27Hannah Fry?

  She has this lab, which she cheerfully calls the torture chamber, where she has different ethical ways in, in which to inflict pain on people. So she stabs people with needles. She burns them with like chili pepper on the skin.

• 38:44Michael Stevens?

  Uh huh.

• 38:44Hannah Fry?

  It's like cutting, burning, what are the other ones? Stinging.

• 38:49Michael Stevens?

  Thermal grilling?

• 38:50Hannah Fry?

  Thermal grilling. She doesn't thermal grill, or at least I didn't see her thermal grill. I think she was actually just causing genuine pain. But she does this to people when they are inside of an MRI scanner.

• 39:02Michael Stevens?

  Hmm.

• 39:03Hannah Fry?

  And what they can do is they can inflict a kind of discreet, measurable amount of pain with these needles that have like particular pressure. So you know that the physical sensation, or at least the cause of the physical sensation is kind of very well controlled between people. And then you can see how people construct or react to that sensation in their brains, depending on on what particular state they're in. And you're absolutely right that basically the more stressed you are, the worse it is. The more relaxed you are, the easier it is. The more that you've had experience of pain in the past, the easier it is.

• 39:44Hannah Fry?

  The more that you think that the pain signifies something dangerous, the worse that it is.

• 39:49Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 39:50Hannah Fry?

  But like all of these things end up really contributing to your experience of what is actually going on.

• 39:56Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, if I am worried about it, I'm going to think about it a lot more. Which also might explain why kids can be so much more affected by what seems like it shouldn't hurt as much as they're acting. But I mean, it's the first time they've felt that.

• 40:10Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Michael Stevens?

  And they're so powerless, like, of course, this is a big deal.

• 40:15Hannah Fry?

  Right.

• 40:16Michael Stevens?

  And it also makes sense how your pain will lessen when help arrives.

• 40:21Hannah Fry?

  Mm hmm.

• 40:21Michael Stevens?

  Because you no longer need to be as careful or cry out for help. It's arrived. It's not necessarily a placebo effect. It's just a straight up your body going, okay, phase one is over. Now we'll begin phase two.

• 40:35Hannah Fry?

  It is just a straight up, actually, it's okay, you're safe.

• 40:37Michael Stevens?

  Yeah.

• 40:38Hannah Fry?

  There was one thing that I used to do with my little girls when they were really young. I tried to teach them that when they would fall over to immediately do jazz hands.

• 40:46Michael Stevens?

  Oh.

• 40:48Hannah Fry?

  To sort of make it into a happy moment. Because I think that they really feed off of your reaction to something. I think if you are like, oh, no, this is serious. Then it's like the panic arises and all of a sudden it becomes a really, really big deal. Whereas if you are like happy and clappy and it's like, hey, no big deal, let's crack on, we're still playing. It's not just that they ignore the pain, it's that the actual pain that they feel is lower.

• 41:13Michael Stevens?

  That's right.

• 41:14Hannah Fry?

  I think that's really it here. We're not talking about placebo. I mean, placebo feeds into this a little bit in the sense that you're tapping into the same thing. But what we're really talking about here is you actually feel it differently. Like your physical sensation is different, depending on how you're feeling.

• 41:30Michael Stevens?

  So is there A way to measure pain at all. I mean, I know we have those like, uh, scale of one to 10, you know, point to the smiley face. Which one are you? I guess that works because it's a subjective thing, but we can't build a painometer, plug it into your brain and go, mm, or plug it into your nerves and go, ah, nah, there's no pain.

• 41:51Hannah Fry?

  In the same way that we can't build a delicious omelette.

• 41:54Michael Stevens?

  Right.

• 41:54Hannah Fry?

  Or like a happy omelette.

• 41:57Michael Stevens?

  A love omelette. Which of your cats do you love more? We're gonna find out today using our love omelette. It never goes wrong. Yeah.

• 42:04Hannah Fry?

  Doesn't work. It doesn't work. I mean, at the same time, we do know lots of things about it. Like, we know that your belief changes it, but we also know that your memory about it afterwards changes.

• 42:15Michael Stevens?

  True.

• 42:15Hannah Fry?

  We know that you don't store it as like a running total. You store it as like a peak and the end. Uh, this is some Kahneman work. He was researching colonoscopies. Colonoscopy is not very nice. They're not very comfortable. Unfortunately, never had one, but you know, my understanding is that it's just not a very nice experience to be part of. But they were talking about people's perception of the pain when the probe was removed immediately afterwards, or when the probe was really slowly removed and then sort of paused before the final removal. And actually, even though the whole process was lengthened, it was a longer period of time

• 42:54Hannah Fry?

  with the gentle removal, people's memory of the colonoscopy was that it was less painful when the ending wasn't so bad.

• 43:03Michael Stevens?

  Right, of course. Yeah, no, when I'm thinking of times I've been in pain, I don't remember the middle of it. I remember like how it started, how it felt after. But yeah, that's interesting. The way I remember my pain is not the way I remember a movie.

• 43:21Hannah Fry?

  No, it's not. It's the peak and the end. That's, that's essentially what you, what you remember. The thing about this, this idea that your brain is giving you kind of free analgesia, right? I think there's something really extraordinary in that, because I think for the last 150 years or so. What science has done in the pursuit of mitigating pain has been, okay, take this drug, you know, we'll compare it against the placebo, but let's see how much extra this drug gives you compared to placebo. And kind of all of the focus has been on that. Um, and in a lot of ways, I feel like we've sort of thrown away the half or maybe more

• 44:06Hannah Fry?

  that actually makes a really gigantic difference, which is a much more woo woo. I'll admit, you know, it's much more sort of like softly, softly, like huggy feelings. But it's also the bit that doesn't come with any side effects.

• 44:20Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, it's woo woo adjacent and I'm glad that we're taking it more and more seriously. Cause here's something weird I heard when I was at McGill University. Acetamethafen in America, what we call Tylenol, especially Tylenol.

• 44:34Hannah Fry?

  Paracetamol in the UK, we call it.

• 44:35Michael Stevens?

  Right. So since Tylenol entered the market, it has become more effective at reducing pain. As a pain reliever, it's gotten better. The chemical formula has not changed. So there's this open question, what's happening? Are our bodies changing? Have we evolved to work better with Tylenol? The best answer seems to be that, no, we just trust that it will help the pain more now. When it was first introduced, people thought, I don't know. Now we just go right to the Tylenol, you take it and you feel better because your brain goes, it's gonna work. So the placebo effect has become more powerful.

• 45:15Hannah Fry?

  I think that we can do a whole other episode on the placebo effect specifically, but it's more than just the sort of illusion, as it were, of like feeling like you're being cured. This is actual, like physiological facts, right? Which is that pain is not a deterministic thing. It is. A sensation that is constructed by your brain, subject to your entire experience. Yeah, I do sort of think we've been kind of ignoring that a little bit. As I've mentioned on this show before, I had cancer a few years ago. And, and I always think that actually the doctors might have cured me, but the nurses made me better.

• 45:57Michael Stevens?

  Ah, interesting.

• 45:59Hannah Fry?

  And I think that is it, right? Like, the nurses were the ones who actually made me feel like it was gonna be okay. You know, they were the ones who were there, like with the tea and sympathy. They were the ones who were like calmly and carefully helping me through the process of like removing all the tubes and what, you know, all of this stuff. And, and I think that what they were doing, a really, really good nurse is one who knows how to tap into your brain's free analgesia.

• 46:29Michael Stevens?

  They do. That's what makes them good nurses. I think that effect extends to all kinds of other professions. I feel like physics keeps me safe on an airplane.

• 46:38Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 46:38Michael Stevens?

  But the flight attendants make me feel safe.

• 46:41Hannah Fry?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Michael Stevens?

  I know that the plane can deal with this amount of turbulence. But when I look at the flight attendants and they're like not even paying attention to it, they're just doing their own thing, looking annoyed or whatever. I'm like, thank goodness. I'm so much less worried because you are, I'm like marrying your behavior. Pain is definitely a, a social phenomenon, a phenomenon of the mind and not just the brain.

• 47:07Hannah Fry?

  Totally agree. At the same time, the last thing I want to tell you about is, so I guess there's like the different places to target pain. And if, and as I said, if you are someone who suffers from chronic pain, it's like, well, that's all very good. But, you know, I can't just like wish myself better. And I agree, it's like, it's really, really difficult to do this. You do also want sort of effective pharmaceuticals. And the thing about like all of the stuff that we have, really, you know, opioids being the most effective at blocking the pain. It, it kind of like blocks everything else as well. You can't really function. Um, it's, you know, it's not specific enough. But going back to that NAV 1.7, the little gate that allows all of this iron's through. So there is some work that is going on now, which is, okay, well, is there a way that you could design a drug?

• 47:52Hannah Fry?

  Or maybe genetically engineer your neurons? Or is there something that you could do that targets that? Channel in particular, right? That little gateway in particular, because actually the other way around, it does happen. So you know the bullet ant?

• 48:09Michael Stevens?

  Don't know.

• 48:10Hannah Fry?

  Okay, so this is supposedly, I mean, there's like some crazy scientists, Justin Schmidt was one in particular, who deliberately go out and so get themselves stung by absolutely everything in order to rank them. He writes like Semelie like notes for different things. So he says a yellow jacket wasp. It's sort of hot and smoky, but almost irreverent in the in the feeling that it gives you. Okay.

• 48:31Michael Stevens?

  Oh, I love that. Yeah.

• 48:33Hannah Fry?

  But the bullet ant is like top dog in terms of how much it hurts. He describes it as flaming charcoal with a three inch rusty nail in your heel, burning for 24 hours. Okay, now, the reason why the bullet ant wins in terms of pain is because its venom actually attacks NAV 1.7, like the exact same channel. Yeah. And so what it does is it just jams the gate open effectively. So that your pain nerves just fire over and over and over and over and over and over and over again and won't switch off. You're doing the exact opposite of what happens with the people who feel no pain whatsoever. This gate is like wide open as opposed to completely closed.

• 49:17Michael Stevens?

  But yet the bullet ant bite is not probably any more dangerous than a black widow, which might not hurt nearly as much and yet is so much more potentially lethal.

• 49:27Hannah Fry?

  Right, just because of this very particular sort of biological formulation. And so the question is, can you do something that directly targets that NAV 1.7? And some people have tried, right? They tried, they tried. I definitely shouldn't laugh about this because it would be amazing if you could. There are different drugs that people have constructed. And there was one of them that actually looked like it was going to be really promising that would target NAV 1.7, would close that channel and then you could choose to turn on and off pain. Unfortunately, NAV 1.7 is also really close in design and sort of the way it's structured to NAV 1.5, which is absolutely critical to maintaining a heartbeat.

• 50:05Michael Stevens?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 50:06Hannah Fry?

  So if you get even a slightly bit wrong, you just start end up closing the pathways that are closing these gates that allow your heart to beat.

• 50:15Michael Stevens?

  That's that's unfortunate.

• 50:17Hannah Fry?

  That is unfortunate, but all the same, I think as we are getting further and further into really amazing molecular biology, design, sort of synthetic biology.

• 50:28Hannah Fry?

  This is, this is, I think, the hope, right? Is that there will come a point in the future where we can create something that allows you on demand to take some kind of pharmaceutical that just switches off that NAV 1.7 when you need it and not when you don't.

• 50:46Michael Stevens?

  Right, so this could have less addictive potential than opioids. It could help people with chronic pain as well.

• 50:53Hannah Fry?

  Exactly.

• 50:54Michael Stevens?

  But there's always the balance of you need some pain, you need to know what's going on with your body, but when it's not helpful, it's not helpful.

• 51:02Hannah Fry?

  Exactly. Okay, so I guess to sum this up then, pain isn't this payment, right? The word says that it's a punishment, but the actual mechanism itself is, I think, more of a gift, actually. This verdict that your brain is creating, this kind of call, this decision that is being made on your behalf, and honestly, mostly in your favor. It's just unfortunate that for some people, that that message keeps on, keeps on blaring even when it shouldn't.

• 51:29Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, but its intentions are good.

• 51:31Hannah Fry?

  Its intentions are good.

• 51:32Michael Stevens?

  But we know what's paved with good intentions, so.

• 51:35Hannah Fry?

  Very true, the road to hell. Okay, I guess that brings us to the end of this episode of The Rest is Science. Thank you very much for staying with us all to this, but look at you guys, look at you go.

• 51:46Michael Stevens?

  Look at you go.

• 51:47Hannah Fry?

  You're the real ones, you know?

• 51:48Michael Stevens?

  I'm painless, honestly.

• 51:49Hannah Fry?

  The real G's.

• 51:50Michael Stevens?

  Yeah, thanks for listening. We really appreciate all of your support and especially your questions. Please keep them coming in. [email protected].

• 52:00Hannah Fry?

  See you next time.

• 52:01Michael Stevens?

  Bye.

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