Essentials: How to Control Your Sense of Pain & Pleasure

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we continue our discussion of the senses, and the senses we are going to discuss are pain and pleasure. Pain and pleasure reflect two opposite ends of a continuum. A continuum that involves detection of things in our skin and the perception, the understanding of what those events are.

Our skin is our largest sensory organ and our largest organ indeed. It is much larger than any of the other organs in our body. And it's an odd organ if you think about it. It has so many functions. It acts as a barrier between our organs and the outside world.

It harbors neurons, nerve cells, that allow us to detect things like light touch or temperature or pressure of various kinds. And it's an organ that we hang ornaments on. People put earrings in their ears. People decorate their skin with tattoos and inks and other things. And it's an organ that allows us to experience either great pain or great pleasure.

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