Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior.
“The Joy of Why” is a Quanta Magazine podcast about curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. The mathematician and author Steven Strogatz and the cosmologist and author Janna Levin take turns interviewing leading researchers about the great scientific and mathematical questions of our time. For more episodes visit Quanta Magazine: https://www.quantamagazine.org/tag/the-joy-of-why/
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0:00 – Introduction: skin, pleasure, and pain
3:06 – Ishmael Abdus-Saboor's path to science
8:18 – Do animals feel pain?
12:12 – Studying pain in rodents
14:54 – Mapping the somatosensory system
20:54 – Building a pain scale
25:05 – From lab discoveries to human pain therapies
29:21 – Placebo, psychology, and pain-addiction links
34:55 – Gentle touch, optogenetics, and social bonding
41:03 – Naked mole rats, touch, and the mystery of consciousness
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Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, but they are far from it. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, nor why a loved one’s touch soothes while a stranger’s touch repels.
To explore the science behind these sensations, Janna Levin talked to Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. Their conversation covers how pain serves an evolutionary purpose, how researchers measure pain and pleasure in the lab despite the absence of any objective biomarker, and how touch functions as a social and emotional signal, not just a sensory one.
Abdus-Saboor also describes his work with naked mole rats — a species that barely feels pain, shows no signs of aging, and lives in colonies built almost entirely on touch — and the ethical trade-offs when studying sensations in animals that cannot describe what they feel.
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The Joy of Why is a podcast from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication supported by the Simons Foundation. Funding decisions by the Simons Foundation have no influence on the selection of topics, guests, or other editorial decisions in this podcast or in Quanta Magazine. The Joy of Why is produced by PRX Productions. The production team is Caitlin Faulds, Jade Abdul-Malik, Genevieve Sponsler, and Merritt Jacob. The executive producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager. From Quanta Magazine, Simon Frantz and Samir Patel provided editorial guidance with support from Samuel Velasco, Simone Barr, and Michael Kanyongolo. Samir Patel is Quanta’s editor-in-chief.
The episode art is by Chanelle Nibbelink and our logo is by Jaki King and Kristina Armitage. Special thanks to Garth Avery at the Cornell Broadcast Studio.
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