Fresh Air - How Does Pain Work? Dr. Sanjay Gupta Explains

Episode Date: September 4, 2025

CNN Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta's new book examines the world of pain — why we feel it, and how we can treat it. He says distraction and meditation can be useful tools for managing pain. He spoke with Terry Gross about how the brain gets pain signals wrong, alternatives to painkillers, and how a family of circus performers inspired a new drug. Gupta's book is It Doesn't Have to Hurt.Also, TV critic David Bianculli reviews the HBO series Task, by the creator of Mare of Easttown, starring Mark Ruffalo.  Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey, everybody, it's Ian and Mike, the hosts of How to Do Everything. That's the show where we take your questions and find overqualified experts to answer them. Alex asked us to write his out-of-office email message. But we don't know how to write, so we called up U.S. Poet Laureate Adilimon. Is this National Public Radio? Sort of. Technically, yes. Season two just dropped.

Listen to the How to Do Everything podcast from NPR. This is fresh air. I'm Terry Gross. When you're in pain, it can be hard to think about end. anything else. My guest, neurosurgeon, and CNN chief medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, writes that over the past few decades, we've learned more than ever about the true nature of pain. We better understand what causes it, what may best relieve it, and what we can do to minimize or even eliminate certain types of pain. Many of those life-changing insights have not yet been made easily available to the public. His new book is an attempt to change that. It's called

it doesn't have to hurt. Dr. Gupta is also the host of the podcast Chasing Life. He's an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Emory University Hospital and is the author of four previous bestsellers. He's won several Emmy Awards as well as two DuPont Columbia Awards, the most recent one for his reporting on the medical use of marijuana. A subject we'll talk about a little later in the interview. He also contributed to CNN's Peabody Award-winning coverage of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina 20 years ago. Dr. Gupta, welcome back to fresh air. Thank you. What a pleasure. I always enjoy our conversations. Thank you for having me. So I'll start with something I've never said to a guest before, which is, tell us how you were impaled. This was just after your 12th birthday?

I was a kid. I was just after 12 years old, just turned 12, and I was running through the neighborhood on a really beautiful day. I still remember. And there was a fence. And I think it was sort of a a wrought iron fence and it had some spikes on top. And I had, you know, obviously knew this fence. Typically, I didn't try and jump over it. I went around it. But this day, I just, I think I felt kind of invincible. And I decided to sort of try and vault myself over. You know, put one hand on and then vulture legs over. And when I tried that, that, I didn't quite make it. And one of the spikes caught me on my side and went in the back area of my side and out the front. So I was, I was sort of stuck there on this, on this fence. It was

just high enough that I could not put my feet down to sort of, you know, hoist myself off the fence. So it pairs through your whole side. Yeah. It was the skin, thankfully. as opposed to going into the chest or into the abdomen, which would have been much worse. But it was sort of a classic in-out sort of injury. And the story is interesting because, first of all, I was there for a couple of minutes before anyone saw me, which was really a very strange feeling. I knew somebody was going to find me, but I think for a moment as a 12-year-old, I thought, what if they don't?

But eventually a neighbor came out. And around the same time, my mom sort of, I don't know how she became aware, but she kind of heard and she came over and the neighbor went to go get this big sort of wire cutter thing. And he was going to basically cut it. But I couldn't wait actually. So with my mom's help, she put her foot down. I mean, she put her hands down so I could put my foot on her hands and I hoisted myself off the spike. So I actually came off the spike. my own before he cut it off. Ouch. And you read that the tissues and the torso don't have as many nerves and as much sensitivity as other parts of the body. Yeah, this was, I think, the first time I started sort of thinking about pain in a different way.

Because, first of all, and I can tell you what it felt like, which was very different than what I would have imagined it to feel like before it happened. But, yeah, one of the things is that the skin on the back, it has fewer of these nociceceptors, these receptors that will actually transmit pain. And by fewer, it also means that they're less dense over an area. When you have a higher density of nociceceptors, that's when they're going to be more sensitive

and they're transmitting signals very quickly because they're so close together, jam-packed together. When those nociceptors are further apart, you have less sensation, you have less what is called two-point discrimination, So your ability to tell the distance between two points is much greater on the back. The two points have to be much, much further apart before you can really tell that there's two points. And it didn't hurt as much as I think many other parts of the body would have.

Okay. So now that we've established that you've experienced pain, what do you mean when you say that pain is created by the brain? In your case, pain was created by a very unnatural injury. But explain that the pain is created by the brain. Whenever we have some sort of thing that happens in the periphery of our body, in this case it was my back, signals are then sent to the brain to basically be processed, to be translated and to be interpreted in some way. When those signals go up, it's kind of like the brain is, you know, rapidly scrolling a social media feed and may say, okay, this is not that important, this is not that important, this is not that important. Oh, wait a second, this, this is incendiary, this particular post.

Let's pay a lot of attention to that. And it determines at that point, is this real, number one, or is it not? Is it noteworthy, meaning how, you know, how significant is it? And what should I do about it? There are certain things that happen before you get to the brain, which is that you might have, like if you touch a hot pan, your hand may jolt away from it. That's happening reflexively.

There are certain nerve fibers that do that. But when it comes to actually determining if something hurts and how much, that is the brain. The brain determines whether or not you have pain. The brain sometimes makes mistakes in its interpretation of pain too. And sometimes it sounds the alarm. too loud and too long, how does the brain make mistakes? And what kind of pain does that lead to? One of the best examples of how the brain can make a mistake is phantom limb pain. And in that

case, a limb doesn't even exist anymore. It was amputated. It still hurts. It was amputated. And yet it still hurts. I think that's one of those sort of insights about the brain that I think led to a lot of learning about what exactly the brain's role was with pain. If the brain's the decider of pain can it create pain as well, and the answer is yes. Referred pain is another sort of mistake. So some people may be having what should be chest pain from a heart attack, but instead of having chest pain, they may have jaw pain. They may have just left arm pain. And some of those are common referrals. We know left arm pain, for example, is very associated with potential heart problem. Doctors are sort of trained. Same thing with jaw pain. And then there's sorts of things where

whatever the reason may be, the brain continues to play the loop of pain over and over again. I guess that's not so much a mistake as it is maybe some sort of glitch where the pain loop doesn't stop. And it's just gets recycled over and over again. And that's chronic pain. So those are some of the ways that the brain can sort of either mistake or misinterpret the signals and the pain. So, you know, a lot of times someone will go to see a doctor and they have chronic pain, but there's no evidence of what's causing it and the injury has healed. So that's a kind of brain misinterpretation. Some would argue that there is a reason and it may have to do with everything from adverse childhood events to even more recent trauma, to a history of depression or anxiety.

As someone said to me, I think it was Mark Jensen at Mayo Clinic, that chronic pain never occurs in isolation. It always occurs with baggage attached. And that baggage could be depression, could be anxiety, could be adverse childhood experiences, could be poor sleep. It could be things that maybe seem more trivial. Could be you're having a really bad day and something that wouldn't have hurt so much, hurt a lot more because you're having a bad day. Maybe you had a bad call with your parent. Whatever it may be, all these things, some more clear, some more arbitrary, seem to have some influence not just on your pain, but how much something's going to hurt and how long it will hurt. So one of the main themes of your book is if the

brain interprets pain, can we get the brain to interpret it differently, or at least turn down the volume of the alarm that it is sending. Do you believe the brain is really capable of being rewired like that? Yeah, I really do. And I've seen it firsthand. The idea that meditation could provide relief, maybe not super durable. It's not something that lasts forever, but the idea that you could take someone's pain score from really terrible pain to a zero out of 10, and I'm not exaggerating, but a zero out of ten for the 30 minutes that they are meditating, I think is real proof of concept that there's a lot that can happen within the brain that can be trained without drugs, without surgery. So yeah, I think the brain can be trained that way.

Do you have a scientific medical explanation for why meditation can decrease pain for at least an interval of time? Dr. Eric Garland is probably the nation. 's leading expert on this. He's out of the University of California, San Diego. And I spent a lot of time with him and asked that same question. And I think we don't know is the most honest answer. I think where people sort of circle around is this idea that distraction could be one component of it. You know, with pain, people are usually hyper-focused on a particular sensation. Being able to take them out of that hyper-focus can be really helpful. There's other people who believe that you're actually decreasing the activity in certain areas of the brain,

specifically an area known as the anterior cingulate cortex, which is an area where pain is processed. Pain is processed in many areas of the brain, but that's one of the primary areas. But we don't know for sure. It would require, I think, a lot more testing to really, you know, look at people's brains while they meditate and understand what's happening. And even then, the answers may not be clear. But what I think is clear, based on lots of data, is that people, people can get significant relief from meditation.

And I even asked Dr. Garland to, like, give me context for what that means, significant relief. I mean, we can put numbers on it, but what he showed and what his most recent paper described was basically similar to five milligrams of oxycodone. That's what meditation can do for you. Five milligrams of oxycodone is very effective. It also doesn't last forever. It has a half-life. meditation sort of the same way.

It doesn't last forever, but you can reduce your pain scores to near zero for a period of time. You actually meditated with the Dalai Lama. I assume you were reporting on him, which is how you got to get the invitation to meditate with him. And you were very self-conscious and distracted

because you were not only meditating and, you know, you were doing it with the Dalai Lama. You reluctantly admitted that to him after the session was over and tell us what he said to you. He told me he also had a difficult time meditating which really surprised me.

I mean, you know, he's the Dalai Lama. He's been meditating, you know, basically his whole life. And he's a master meditator. He gets up, I think, 3.30 in the morning and he meditates for a couple of hours before he starts his regular day.

And that was the time that I was meditating with him. But he sort of conceded that it can be challenging for people to meditate. You have to be very intentional about it. One of the points you make in the book is that researchers have found that pleasure and savoring, savoring food, savoring pleasure, making sure you make some space for pleasure or savoring in your life, that it isn't a waste of time that you're actually rewiring your brain. and countering pain in ways that strengthen with practice.

Can you talk about that a little bit about what that might mean? Sure. I think our default position probably as humans is to be creatures that have gratitude and savor and want to experience pleasure. That's no surprise. But what I think is really interesting is that we have this system within our body, the endogenous opioid system, which is by endorphins, which means endo, which means inside the body, and fins, which is morphine, this is like our internal morphine system, endorphin system. We can activate this system in all sorts of different ways. And by activating, I mean exactly what it sounds like.

You just basically release a lot of these endorphins, these basically personalized morphine molecules all throughout your body. And one of the ways that they have shown can really facilitate that is to not just practice gratitude, but to actively practice gratitude, meaning actually savor something. I'm not just grateful for this ice cream cone. I'm like just so enjoying this ice creaming cone. I'm not just grateful for being able to look at this sunset. I am gazing at every different color in the sky and just taking it all in. It's a very active form of gratitude, and it seems to be very associated with basically activating the endogenous opioid system, which is really fascinating to me.

Some people would refer to this as sort of the mechanism behind placebo effect. Others say the placebo effect is going to be a lot more intricate than that. But when it comes to pain specifically, I think we know all these different things that we're talking about, whether it be meditation, whether it be savoring, all these things. mechanistically probably have some component of activating this, this really wonderful, intricate system in our bodies. I guess it also teaches the person who is savoring or having pleasure to distract themselves from pain because just as pain distracts you from the things you need to do, having pleasure really distracts you from the pain. Yeah. I think it's becoming increasingly clear that these types of, you know, feel-good transmitters, endorphins are released in response

to certain things that happen in our lives. You know, even going back to when I impaled myself on that fence, I think what was so interesting to me, and I was only 12 years old at the time, but when I reflected on it, it obviously hurt when I got impaled. But then I was basically pinned there on the fence for several minutes. And you know what, Terry? After a while, while, not only did it not hurt as much, I actually started to feel, strangely, a bit of euphoria. Really? Which is, yeah, which is really weird.

But I think what happens for some people, and probably I fit into this, is that when you do have an injury or, you know, whatever might happen to you, if you activate your endogenous opioid system, for some people, it reacts really vigorously, like really, really, really churns out a bunch of endorphins. And so you could have this really sort of ironic situation where you get a terrible injury and you're almost laughing. You're like, oh my God, you know. And I think it's a very protective sort of response from the body.

And not everyone responds the same way. Some people probably make fewer endorphins and maybe if it had been raining on me and I hadn't eaten well that day, maybe I would have made fewer endorphins. But for a period of time, I really had no pain. In fact, I remember I reached behind. with my hand at one point to feel the spike and convince myself that it was still there. Are there any medications that exist or that are in development that could turn on the body's natural opioid system and release more endorphins?

What we've done is basically try to give endorphins, right? We've, instead of saying exactly what you said, which is can you harness the body's own EOS, endogenous opioid system. Instead, we said, oh, the body makes endogenous morphine. Let us synthesize this molecule on our own. Let us create a drug that essentially attaches to the same receptors that these endorphins do, the mu receptors in the body. And that was sort of the genesis of opioids. You know, so many techniques and medications that we use in real life take their inspiration from our human body, and that's one of them. So we give opioids, probably more so than focusing on teaching the body to release its own opioid system. And while they both may have

opioid in the name, they're very different. One thing is that with your own opioid system, it is very, very sensitive. So it can turn on and it can turn off really, really well. So instead of having the lingering sort of side effects of opioids and sedation and all these other things, the opioids that you make yourself can just be washed away very, very quickly. The second thing is that impact on mood, it can actually make you euphoric, can really improve your mood. And the third thing is that people with opioids often, it does not suppress their memory. In fact, it may actually worsen it. And worsen it in this case means over-remembering.

So people who take opioids long-term might actually start to have more pain because they become increasingly challenged to forget their pain. Right. So an answer to our researchers trying to develop an external form of endorphins, your answer is, yeah, morphine, and it didn't work out very well. But that's why pleasure is kind of like a prescription right now. Yeah. I think pleasure, savoring, we know these things will release more opioids. People tend to feel better. Their pain tolerance goes up. And their remembering of unpleasant things goes. down. So all these things sort of happen. I always say if the endogenous opioid system didn't exist, women would probably never have more than one child. You know, it can be a painful experience, but those opioids help with the pain, they help with the mood, and then that memory component is so fascinating to me. It can actually inhibit your memory. Like I talked to my wife about this. Rebecca, we have three girls. And she's like, yeah, you know, I had the baby. By the time we're

having the second one, it wasn't like something she reflected on and was traumatized by. That's like one of the most significant things that happens in your life. How could you possibly forget that? And maybe it's forgetting is not the right word, but how could you not remember it really vividly? And I think that's not by accident. I think that's really our own endorphins sort of doing their job in terms of pain, mood, and memory. Okay, we need to take another break here, but there's plenty more to talk about. If you're just joining us, my guest is Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent,

and author of the new book, It Doesn't Have to Hurt. We'll talk more about pain and pain relief. After a short break, I'm Terry Gross, and this is fresh air. On the ThruLine podcast from NPR, immigration enforcement might be more visible now, but this moment didn't begin with President Trump's second inauguration, or even his first. A series from ThruLine about how immigration. integration became political and a cash cow. Listen to ThruLine in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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and meet a Mexican street sweeper who became a pop star. We don't go around the world, we're already there. Listen to the state of the world podcast from NPR every weekday. Let's talk about the latest understanding of inflammation and antinators. inflammatories. And that would include medications like Advil and Motrin. Inflammation is an essential part of healing after an injury. It protects the injury. It's like putting a protective covering over the injury. But after a while, it seems like part of the problem is the inflammation itself. Sometimes it just won't go away or it just lingers too long or gets too large. I think for the

most part, inflammation has sort of gotten a bad rap. I think that the idea that I don't want to have inflammation, I'll do everything I can to get rid of inflammation if I have some sort of injury, that has been, I think, the prevailing wisdom for a long time. And I think it's understandable. I think when you look at a sprained ankle, for example, and it looks swollen and red, the idea that I want to get rid of that, that's associated with my pain, makes sense. intuitive sense. I think the idea that that inflammation serves a real purpose that not only is it sort of helping protect the site of injury, but also sending all these various molecules to the side of injury to help with the healing, I think is also what's happening at that point. So there

was a study that came out that basically was trying to figure out who is most likely to have chronic pain after injuries. So if you look at the sprained ankle examines, example, who is most likely to still have pain three months later? And interestingly, and the researchers weren't looking for this, what they found was that people who had the lowest levels of inflammation at the time of injury were the most likely to have chronic pain. So low levels of inflammation were linked to chronic pain, not high levels of inflammation. And it was really relevant, I think, for people, especially in the sports world and orthopedic surgeons and physical therapists to sort of look at the guidance that had typically been given to people,

which was do everything you can to decrease inflammation. So some researchers are recommending now not taking anti-inflammatories right after an injury. When do researchers suggest that you do take anti-inflammatories? I think it's if you can't tolerate it. That's the thing about pain is that everyone's threshold is going to be a little bit different. Again, if you haven't broken it, I'm telling you it's better to mobilize. and not try and decrease inflammation, I think for a lot of people, they think they need to take anti-inflammatories. Oh, this is bad. I got to treat that. That inflammation's not good. That's hurting my body.

But if I flip the script on you and I say, it's not bad for your body. That is exactly how your body is supposed to work. This is your body doing its job. This may be a good time to mention that acetaminophen, for example, Tylenol is not an anti-inflammatory. That's right. In your book, and describe what kinds of problems could be treated with acetaminophen like Tylenol or ibuprofen like Advil and Motrin, you have, under both categories, under both types of pills, that they're really not for nerve pain. Why not? nerve pain or neuropathic pain tends to be a different sort of pain. Again, with anti-inflammatories, I guess it's inherent in the name, the way that it works. Tylenol can help decrease inflammation, but in a totally different mechanism.

It's very good at reducing fever. Nerve pain really seems to be something that has to do with an abnormality of the way the nerve is actually conducting signals. So, for example, when someone herniates a disc in their back or their neck and it puts pressure, on the nerve, the nerve is not conducting the same way. It may be over-sending some signals or understanding other signals. And what you're really trying to do in that sort of situation is take certain meds that might balance out that nerve conduction again. And that's a different class of medications. There are several classes that can do this, but not typically anti-inflammatories. You know what I sometimes wonder, can a numbing agent like lidocaine train the brain to think like,

oh, there's no longer pain so I can turn the pain signals like the unnecessary pain signals from chronic pain. I can turn them off now. Can you trick a brain with a numbing agent? This is a really interesting question. And lydocane's a good example of this. So lydicane is what's called a sodium channel blocker. You know, whenever there's signals being transmitted in the body, the way those signals move is through changes in ions, sodium, potassium ions like that. If you can block certain of those sodium channels, you can inhibit certain sensations, in this case, pain or sensation overall, because lytocaine makes you numb. It's not just taking away pain. I don't know that there's any indication that they will necessarily train your brain in some way to have any benefit beyond the time that the lytocane is there in terms of chronic pain.

You can get rid of it for a period of time, and we use. lytocaine to basically convince ourselves as surgeons that something that we're about to do is going to be beneficial. So someone who has trigeminal neuralgia, I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but it's lancinating face pain, tick delirou, it's called. And it's one of the worst pains I think a human can actually feel, just these lightning bolts of pain in your face. But anyways, one of the things that we'll do is we may inject the root of the nerve with some numbing agent like lydicane. and basically see if that takes away the pain. And if it does, that gives us an indication that it may be okay

to heat up that area of the nerve or to use chemicals to sort of make that nerve not conduct anymore. But that's what those types of numbing agents are good for. Well, it's time for another rake, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest, is neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. His new book is called It Doesn't Have to Hurt. We'll talk more after a break.

This is fresh air. How would you describe the discourse around sexiness online and three words or less? I would say polarized, ideological, and unrooted from reality. I just thought corny, not horny. Love that. I'm Brittany Luce. If you're surprised to hear the words sexy and horny in the same sentence as NPR, you'll be shocked to hear what else I'm talking about.

Listen to the It's Been a Minute podcast today. While you were writing your new book, a non-opioid pain medication was approved by the FDA. Tell us about it. Yeah, the medication is called Suzetrogen. It is a new pain medication. And interestingly enough, it is the first new pain medication that was approved by the FDA in the United States since 1998, which I found really remarkable. I mean, the last one was Celebrex. And just to give some context, the FDA will typically approve 40 to 50 new drugs a year.

But for pain, which is a condition, chronic pain, that affects 20% of the population. And according to some of the statistics we saw, is the fastest growing condition now in the United States, faster than cancer, diabetes, and dementia. It's pretty remarkable that we hadn't had a new option for pain. But Suzetrogen is that new option, and it is a fascinating story of how it came about. There were these families of circus performers in Karachi, Pakistan, that got the attention of researchers, whatever, 25, 30 years ago. And they saw that these circus performers were able to do all these remarkable things, like they could put sharp things through their appendages, and they could walk on hot coals and do all that. sort of stuff. But what they found was that when they were doing this, they could feel the

coals on their feet, and they could feel that they were hot. They just didn't have pain. And that's very different than what we were just talking about with lydicane, which basically numbs you. So when you're numb, you just have no sensation. Here they had sensation. They just didn't have pain. And that was pretty striking because it gave these researchers a clue as to which sodium channel blocker may be important when it came to just targeting pain and not sensation overall. They studied this family. They found that they had a gene in common. I think it's called SCN-9. And basically for 25 years, these researchers tried to replicate what that gene was doing in the body. Now, one of the big challenges of creating a medicine like that is something you alluded to

earlier, which is that you didn't want to take away pain forever. Pain has utility. It can keep you safe. It can teach you lessons. So they wanted to create a half-life for the drug. So they basically now have an oral formulation. I think it's twice a day formulation to basically try and treat pain, something that they hadn't had a new therapy for in over 25 years. Let's talk about cannabis as a pain medication. You've done extensive reporting. cannabis as medicine. What are some of your takeaways about the use of it for pain? We spent a lot of time looking at the literature around cannabis. And I walked into it thinking that if I really examined all this literature, there was going to be a pretty compelling

case made for using cannabis for all sorts of different pains, but mostly neuropathic pain, this type of pain where the nerves just not conducting well and either over or underconducting, causing pain. And I walked away not as impressed, to be quite honest, as I thought I would be. And this is just the data talking. I will say it's hard to collect this data when you're dealing with a substance that has been a level one substance in the United States for a long time. It's just really hard to get good studies. It's hard to get funding probably too, right? Yeah. And then there's a lot of stigma attached to it so people don't volunteer for the

trials, whatever it might be. But having said that, the best available data seem to that for about a third of the people, it could be pretty effective and maybe in some cases as effective as the best other options for that neuropathic pain. Terry, for about two-thirds of people, it really did not seem to be that effective. And this is the case, I think, for about a third of people, they get significant benefit. And we don't quite know who those third of people are. We don't know what makes them different than the other two-thirds that they're getting that kind of relief. Is there any evidence that it might be the placebo effect? Yeah, I think that they're looking at all sorts of different things, including placebo effect. I think one of the researchers that I

talked to, I think it was Julie Holland, she kept making this point that I thought was a really good point, that expectations and experience are inextricably linked, especially when it comes to pain. And the idea that if you really expect something to work, it's more likely to work. And that isn't necessarily your body or your brain playing tricks on you. That is probably, again, harnessing that endogenous opioid system. You think it's going to work? Your body's like, oh, yeah, I'm about to get relief. Wow, I'm already feeling it, you know.

And that in part could be those endorphins starting to really ramp up. Another way of kind of retraining the brain is deep brain stimulation, which uses electric impulses in parts of the brain, in relevant parts of the brain. It's used now for Parkinson's disease. There's like a little device that's implanted in the appropriate part of the brain, and there's a remote control. You can turn it up or turn it down. So how is that being used in pain relief, or is it just in the real beginning stages? Deep brain simulation's been around for a long time, and, you know, Parkinson's was one of the things, but they also treat things like obsessive-compulsive disorder now, even with Tourette's, things like that with deep brain stimulation. It's pretty fascinating. The idea of using it for pain sort of came about in a very interesting way. I think one of the big questions neuroscientists have been percolating on for a long time is we know pain is processed in the brain. Is there a way to figure out where and how it's processed in the brain and also to measure it in some way? Right now, we're primarily relying on, you know, smiley or frowny faces for patients to tell us how much pain they have. But is there a way to objectify that in some way? And I think that's really how these researchers, Prasad Travolker and others at UCSF, started approaching this, was to say, okay, these patients who have pain.

and these were the worst of the worst patients. They had pain that was so refractory. They had sometimes dozens of operations, spinal cord stimulators, taking many generations of pain medications, and they just weren't getting relief. They were the ones who qualified for the trial, and the trial basically consisted of putting a bunch of stimulators all over the brain, left side and right side,

and basically just listening to the brain. When the person had pain, they recorded it, and they would do this for months, and they would basically say, okay, whenever the patient has pain, what happened in the brain at that point? Was there a transfer of energy somewhere? Is there something to see?

And using, you know, machine learning now, being able to analyze a lot of that data, because it's a lot of data, you have 84 billion neurons in the brain, they were able to find those areas, in some ways measure them, seeing how much energy was actually changing in that part of the brain,

which gave some sort of correlates, correlation with the significance of pain or the severity of pain. And they even got to the point where they could start to predict that change of energy before the patient felt it. And they even got to the point where they could then interrupt it. Much like you do with Parkinson's, you gave a little jolt of electricity at that point and you basically interrupt that pain signaling at that point in the brain. It was proof of concept, I think, to your fundamental question, which is, this is

not only is this the formative stages, this isn't something that's ever going to be, you know, for the masses, where no one is suggesting that brain surgery, which is what these patients had, is going to be the answer. But I think what it is proven is that pain is very much in the brain, and we can objectify it in ways that we did not fully appreciate before. That's fascinating. Is AI being used as part of this to process the data? Yes. I think if you talk to these researchers, I don't think they could have done this probably without at least these large machine learning models. It is so much data. I mean, they had some idea where pain processing is likely to occur.

There's some areas of the brain that are more likely to process pain than others. But there is no single pain processing center. So they needed to look all over the brain and then just spend this time correlating lots and lots of data. with all these energy transfers that are happening in the brain because your brain is constantly communicating. And I got to tell you, I got to spend time with the patient

who got tremendous success with this strategy that I've described and he just had terrible pain for decades. You know, it's the kind of pain I'm not sure I could have tolerated in my own life the way he described it, just like these snakes constantly biting his feet and razor blades.

all the time. He had a condition known as CRPS, chronic regional pain syndrome. And he's in the hospital and he's got the stimulator in. And he's, you know, in the middle of a patient visit. And all of a sudden he goes, oh. And they said, what? He goes, I don't have pain. The veil of pain just went away. I've had this veil over my face and over my, you know, brain for decades. And it just got lifted. I don't have pain. It was, it was the wide. wildest thing. I don't know where the research goes in terms of what this is going to mean for the masses, but it was really, really amazing to see that kind of relief. Well, on that note, Sanjay Gupta, thank you so much for talking with us.

Thanks, Terry. I always look for it. I write books just so I can have these conversations with you. Really appreciate your time. I appreciate yours. Thank you so much. And be well. Thank you. Sanjay Gupta is a neurosurgeon and CNN's chief medical correspondent. His new book about pain is called It Doesn't Have to Hurt. After we take a short break, TV critic David B. and Cooley will review the new HBO crime series task by the creator of Mayor of East Town. It stars Mark Ruffalo. This is fresh air. The creator of HBO's hit show, Mayor of Easttown, has returned with another HBO crime series set in the Sun. Suburbs of Philadelphia and the Poconos. It's called Task and stars Mark Ruffalo as an FBI agent running a small task force. It premieres this Sunday, then streams on HBO Max.

Our TV critic David Bioncouli has this review. Mayor of Easttown, which starred Kate Winslet as a small-town Pennsylvania police detective, was a terrific crime drama. It was as much a character study as a detective story and made the most of both its characters and its location. Its writer-creator, Brad Inglesby, leaned into the miniseries or limited series format. Because it was a one-time story, even the most central characters might die at any point, upping the tension considerably.

With its settings, its accents, and its deeply drawn, deeply flawed, deeply flawed people, mayor of Easttown was a very memorable HBO drama. So memorable, it hardly seems possible that it's been four years since, it was televised. But now, Inglesby is back with a new drama set in Pennsylvania. Once again, we get references to Wawa and Scrapple, visits to Rita's Water Ice, and lots of Delaware County or Delcoe back roads and thick accents. This time, it's a seven-part drama called TASC, which HBO will roll out weekly on Sundays. And this time, the actor at its center, instead of Kate Winslet, is Mark Ruffalo.

On the big screen in the Marvel universe, Ruffalo plays Bruce Banner and The Hulk. But on TV, he's specialized in starring in limited series or miniseries that showcase him without any reliance on special effects. In Netflix's World War II drama, All the Light We Cannot See, he played the father of a blind French girl. In HBO's, I Know This Much Is True, he played twin brothers, one of whom had mental health issues. He was excellent in both dramas, and now in task, Mark Ruffalo serves up his best small-screen role of all, as FBI agent Tom Brandis.

When we meet Tom, he has a bit of a drinking problem, just as Kate Winslet's character did in Marevistown. And, like her, he has uneasy relationships with his friends and family. As the drama opens, Tom is preparing for a dull day, staffing an FBI recruitment desk at a low career fair. Right away, as he introduces himself to a young man who stops to look at a pamphlet, Tom hints at some of the deeper currents lurking underneath his laid-back-to-meet. Tom Brandis. Kyle. There you go. I'll take one of these.

Recent grad? Yeah, widener. Congratulations. What's your degree in? Accounting, which doesn't exactly make much sense for me to be stopping at an FBI booth. You'd be surprised. I majored in philosophy as an undergrad. I became a priest for eight years. And I'm here now talking to you about what the FBI has to offer.

We have a very wide reach here at the Bureau. This is like an actual job in the FBI? Well, I'm a field agent. Normally, that's my just taking a little time off. I'll be back on assignment again soon. On the bad guys. Watch out bad guys. A lot of minor mysteries are reviewed.

revealed in that brief exchange. Why did Tom become a priest? And why did he stop? Why did he take time off from active duty on the force? And when will he return to chase those bad guys? That last question is answered almost immediately. Tom is summoned by his captain, who's played with her own brand of weariness and sarcasm by the wonderful Martha Plimpton. The captain has a job for him, whether he likes it or not. The SAC called me. They want me to put together a task force. I know. I'm sorry.

I assigned Maria Herrera to lead, but she got ordered to bed rest. What is it? Oh, it's something about a leaky uterus. What's the job? Sorry. There's been a spade of home invasions. Mottco and Delco counties, two sometimes three-man crew, middle of the night. They're targeting drug houses.

through DEA informants we know of at least nine houses that have been hit and of those nine seven belong to members of a motorcycle gang and the dark hearts you ever run across them I brush with them in violent crimes

they just found two bodies last week behind a concrete plant Ridley they're low-level distributors but the dark hearts are retaliating blaming other gangs they're spinning we need to find this crew before turf war escalates.

From that simple seed, everything in task sprouts and spreads. Tom gets paired with the three young members of his new task force, each of them with their own quirks, personalities, and past problems. As for the people they're hunting, both the bikers and the home invaders, all of them have well-delineated problems and personalities, too. Tom Pelfrey, as the masked robber named Robbie, and Amelia Jones, as his niece Mave, are two of the many standout actors and characters in this strong, rich cast. Inglesby delivers surprises and cliffhangers in every episode, but the most powerful elements to me

are the many long, intimate conversations between the various characters, about faith and death, love and duty, and family and responsibility. Ruffalo's FBI agent, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than he seems. You can say the same for Ruffalo's nuanced performance and for all of this new HBO series called TASC. Task has a lot of tension and action and conflict, but also has a lot of heart and emotion and deeper meaning. I've seen the entire seven-part drama, and the ideas and the emotions in TASC end up outweighing the mystery in the action, and they linger. I expect I'll be thinking about TASC for quite a while. David B. Incouli is a professor of television studies at Rowan University.

He reviewed the new series, Task. It premieres on HBO Sunday, then streams on HBO Max. If you'd like to find out what's happening behind the scenes of our show and get our producer's recommendations for what to watch, read, and listen to you, subscribe to our free newsletter at WHY.org slash fresh air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited. I have Phyllis Myers, Roberta Sherrock, Anne Marie Boldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and John Sheehan. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper.

Our consulting visual producer is Hope Wilson. Thea Chalonner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tanya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.