SciShow Tangents - Pain

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive science knowledge showcase. I'm your host, Hank Green, and joining me this week, as always, is science expert, Sari Reilly. Hello. And our resident everyman, Sam Schultz. Hi. It was a long October. It was very spooky, and we're all very tired after our long, spooky Halloween. I've heard that, Sari, that you overindulged on Halloween. Is that right? What did you drink? What did you have? I drank so much ectoplasm. It just kept pouring out of my walls and I scooped it up and put it right in my tummy. And now I have the worst ghostly hangover. I think she had a whole ghost. At least one. One ghost worth of ectoplasm. Not what you're supposed to do with it.

Starting point is 00:00:59 I did the pumpkin challenge is where you fill a pumpkin with vodka and then every day you drink a little bit of it until at the very end you just have like the grossest vodka and you have to finish it on halloween how did that go for you you put a lot of nutmeg in that's how you sort of balance it It actually sounds really nice. It's a spicy mold. What did you have, Sam? I didn't drink anything, but somebody just hit me in the head with a big axe. Did you get him back? No, I died. We all have headaches today.

Starting point is 00:01:48 One of us drank a ghost, one of us drank a pumpkin full of vodka, and one of us got axe murdered. And it's definitely not October 25th, and we're lying also. Is it October 31st right now for them? No, it's November something. We had a rerun last week, so it's even later. If we had hangovers for two weeks long, wow, then I really would have been actually- That's going to be super confusing then if it's coming out November 7th. Yeah, they'll figure it out. Okay. We got really, really drunk. Well, also if it's coming out November 7th, you're halfway through your chance to sign up for this year's Awesome Socks Club, where all of our socks profit goes to charity.

Starting point is 00:02:30 But also, it's a delight. Every week, I mean month, you get a different pair of socks designed by a different independent artist delivered right to your door. And we now have ankle socks, as well as the mid-calf cruise that we've always had. So you got ankle socks, and we're mid-calf cruise that we've always had so you got ankle socks and we're shipping out of the european union if you don't want to pay those those pesky customs fees and uh for shipping is free and you can go to awesome socks dot club sign up right now you're such a pro hank yeah well turn that one right around i need to know when these episodes are coming out i got a promotion schedule i need people to know when these episodes are coming out. I got a promotion schedule.

Starting point is 00:03:05 I need people to know about the wonderful amazingness of the Awesome Socks Club. I'm wearing the socks right now. They're very comfortable. We work very hard to make them very cozy and comfortable, including Sam's lovely fiance, Rachel, who is one of the main drivers of the Awesome Socks Club. We have so many socks here, Hank. We got a sock. I can't tilt my camera down, but I am also all socked up right now. But they're great socks.

Starting point is 00:03:29 They're beautiful. They're great, beautiful socks. They are. But that's not what we came here to talk about today. What did we come here to talk about today? Every week here on Tangents, we get together to try to one-up a maze and delight each other with science facts while also trying to stay on topic. Our panelists are playing for glory and for Hank Bucks, which I'll be awarding as we play.

Starting point is 00:03:46 And at the end of the episode, one of them will be crowned the winner. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. It's not socks. This week from Sam. A splinter, a hangnail, a headache, a stitch, a paper cut, contusion, a fracture, an itch,

Starting point is 00:04:01 a tumble, a slip, a sprain, a bruise, a sore throat, a slipped disc, a bug bite, the blues, a sprain, a bruise, a sore throat, a slipped disc, a bug bite, the blues, a slip on the ice, a punch in the nose, a stye in the eye or a stomp on the toes, a bump on the noggin, a burn from a flame to be gored, stabbed or shoved, to be mauled, to be maimed. From bad news to bad food, from a scrape to a hit, pain helps us navigate the world, but that doesn't mean it's not bullshit. and important and also often malfunctions into territory of being pure BS. But also, even when it's doing its job correctly, it's no fun.

Starting point is 00:04:52 I'll tell you that. I wish when I had a headache, I could just say, okay, I understand, body. I do have a headache. You can stop alerting me to the fact now. There isn't anything I can do to fix this problem. So stop telling me about it. But no, we don't have that power. And this is, I don't think going to be an easy one,

Starting point is 00:05:12 but Sari, what is pain? No, it's not an easy one, but I'll take a stab at it. So according to researchers who study pain, it is both a sensory and emotional experience that is associated with actual internal or external tissue damage or potential damage. Oh, yeah. And any descriptions around that. From what I can find, we use pain pretty loosely to apply to all animals because it is a common and easy word and we get the concept of, owie, hurt. It hurts. Do animals hurt? I don't know. Let's use the word pain to ask those questions about everything. In humans,

Starting point is 00:06:01 Ask those questions about everything. In humans, the biopsychosocial model of pain is what a lot of people use, which is a combination of biological factors. So how your body physically responds to a trauma, psychological factors. So how your brain responds to that trauma and then social factors. So how we as social animals respond to pain differently if we're putting on a show for others or if our culture has told us that our pain isn't valid, how does that change your experience of pain? And when we talk about pain in non-human animals it seems like the general trend is to specifically call it nociception which is tissue injury like how how do they respond and react to tissue injury and what kind of negative stimuli are sent through the nervous system and if there are less complex nervous systems then you start getting into language of like how do they just respond to noxious stimuli do they crawl away or wiggle

Starting point is 00:07:13 whatever bacteria do wiggle wiggle bad uh or stop eating wiggle like not go yeah i don't know so the researchers say that that's an important part of pain is the emotional aspect of it like that's an like i don't like this emotional aspect of it. Like that's an. Like, I don't like this being, being like the sort of like simplest version of the emotion, but like, can you not like something if you are a worm? We're not sure. Like, is it like, do they have liking and not liking, or do they have just sort of like react when, when certain biochemical pathways are triggered, react in certain ways. So we think that the reason for pain

Starting point is 00:07:47 is to alert us to something bad. And that's like the idea of pain as a protection, a layer of protection biologically, psychologically, to, ouch, I'm touching a hot thing, or, oh no, an ax murderer bonked me on the head. It hurt, I gotta tell ya. All the situations in which you may not know something bad is happening, and then your body is alerting you to tissue damage that's happening that maybe you can prevent in some

Starting point is 00:08:20 way or treat after the fact. But then the systems get so complicated that we end up with pain even in situations when we don't need to have it yeah and so there's this category of non-protective pain which is everything else that scientists don't quite understand so like the the chronic pains that come with terminal cancer or nerve injuries or migraines when who knows what your body when you get that weird ache in your shoulder and did you do something bad i don't know you slept weird it's not telling you anything that you can change right now yeah it's like what why do i have that rubbing it doesn't help stretching it doesn't help nothing helps it's just there thanks yeah but

Starting point is 00:09:05 we we developed it to protect ourselves but then we also ended up with kinds of pain that that really don't do that job and i think of a lot of the things that we define on the podcast it is we say a lot like you know when you see it you know a hole when you see it you know i don't know a frog when you see it uh but not always but pain is is very much a human experience and it's like you know your pain more than anyone else knows your pain right uh and it's so subjective to the point where even scientists like any anything neurosciency i i consistently think that in a couple hundred years, we'll look back on what we know now and be like, we didn't know anything about the brain. You're absolutely right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:51 This is the area in which medical technology is preventing us from learning so much about it or just like we haven't studied it long enough. We haven't studied it long enough. And so pain is one of those things where we have these scales, we have these subjective tests where we have people report demographic information about themselves and then ask them to rate their pain on a number scale. And those are all over the place because we have no good way of equalizing these sensations of pain because they're so multifaceted across different people you know what i've always thought is that we should have a set a scale for pain and you like just make the noise that the pain would be cool so like my back hurts a little bit right now and the noise is like but like quieter than that like it's like that's that's what it that's how it feels would louder be hurt more yeah louder is more but like it's like that's that's what it hurts that's how it feels would louder be hurt more yeah louder is more but then there's like also like

Starting point is 00:10:50 like sharp pain and dull pain like though like you we know what those things mean but i like i feel like if i stub my toe it's like that's the noise i just want to go to the doctor and the doctor be like what is it on a scale of like to like hank i think i've broken your system already because even when i bump into something and i don't experience pain i say ow i don't know why i like feel bad i bump into the chair i go ow and then i really think about it and I don't hurt at all. I just ow. I just ow because that's my reaction to bumping into something. So my noise is really bad.

Starting point is 00:11:32 Next time you have a pain, try and make the noise. Do it in voice memos and send it to me. Okay. Everybody do that to Hank. Send him tweets of you screaming in various ways. Your pain noises. Actually, look, just send it to me on Twitter. I'll listen.

Starting point is 00:11:46 I want to hear your pain. It sounds like a very caring sentiment. Like, I want to hear your pain. But no, from Hank, it's like, I want to hear your weird noise that you make. Do we know anything about the etymology of the word pain? So pain comes from the Latin pena, like a subpoena that you issue to someone to summon them to. Is it like drawing your attention to something? Is that what it is? Or no?

Starting point is 00:12:15 No, it's for punishment or penalty or retribution. So a subpoena is specifically requiring a defendant to come to court to answer a charge or a penalty that is issued against them okay or and it's like subject to penalty if you don't comply so that's why it's a subpoena so that's where pain comes from but nociception also comes from a latin root of no seer which means to do harm or noxious is unwholesome or harmful like those words the nos nosferatu is it nosferatu yeah yes definitely nosferatu it means a really bad feratu you can get you but next we are going to do the quiz portion of our show where I've got a quiz for the two of you. Do you want to do that? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:06 Yeah, I guess so. Okay, good. So pain is, of course, while unpleasant, a necessary part of our experience of life. It helps our bodies identify potentially harmful situations. But as familiar as pain can be, it sometimes manifests or does not manifest in strange or acutely unwelcome ways. The following are three strange scientific stories about pain, but only one of them is true. Can you tell me which one it is? Is it story number one?

Starting point is 00:13:35 To help dogs prepare for dental surgery, a veterinarian designed a dog pacifier that has a painkiller dissolved in the material and the dog sucks on the pacifier. that has a painkiller dissolved in the material and the dog sucks on the pacifier. Painkillers slowly released into their mouth so that it can work directly where the surgery happened. Dogs don't have lips. Dogs can't suck on a pacifier. Just imagine a little dog with its little purse lip. It's specifically made for doggy mouths.

Starting point is 00:14:02 Or it could be. It could be story number two. Scientists studying cats realized that the cats are able to distribute their weight on their paws to minimize pain while walking on sharp surfaces. To confirm this, scientists filled a room with Legos and monitored the cats for pain as they navigated this precarious landscape. Or, scientists are weird. You know, you know scientists are weird. You know, scientists are weird. But it also could be story number three. Scientists have found that a flesh-eating bacteria

Starting point is 00:14:30 pokes holes in pain receptors using a toxin. This has the double effect of making the infection extremely painful, but also cutting off signals to immune cells that would alert them to the bacteria's presence. So you got cats, dogs, and flesh-eating bacteria. I thought you were going to go with a theme there. The three best pets.

Starting point is 00:14:51 Yeah, the three best pets. My dog, Pete. My cat, Pete. And my flesh-eating bacteria, Pete. God damn it. So it could be the veterinarian's design of painkiller pacifier for dogs, scientists constructing a Lego labyrinth for cats,

Starting point is 00:15:06 or flesh-eating bacteria poking holes in your pain cells and protecting themselves from your immune system. So they stop you from feeling pain as much. Is that what they're doing? No, they make you feel pain more, but they mess up the systems that the immune system used to transfer information, apparently. So you hurt a lot, but your body can't defend against them.

Starting point is 00:15:29 So it's all bad. I'm very not in favor of flesh-eating bacteria. If this is the one, that's very worrying because I don't like pain. And you like your flesh? You know, as opposed to not having it. Yeah, for sure. It's not usually, I don't like look in the mirror and say nice i like that flesh but if you had looked in the mirror and you had a skull for a

Starting point is 00:15:52 face you'd say gosh i missed it i didn't appreciate it while i was here that's right exactly right the other two seem so so goofy compared to it like flashing bacteria poking holes in neurons it's like okay this is we're talking about science here yeah and then it's like oh here's my cat some legos are on the ground here's my dog here's a little pacifier pacifier like a freaking baby yeah two two of them are cartoons and then there's flash eating bacteria staring me in the face yeah this is cheating like to keep it mixed up. Never know what you're going to, never know what to expect. I think I stand by dog.

Starting point is 00:16:30 Like, that's such a weird way to describe what a dog would do. It's a pacifier. Because I think it would chew up whatever it had, right? Like, or like if it was in its mouth, it would chew. Dogs do nurse. Like, they suck a teat and get that the dog milk from it yeah i mean you could have just said dog's nurse and i understand what that means i gotta really help you visualize this no i know there's not i don't know yeah so they obviously you just you got to make the

Starting point is 00:17:02 pacifier shaped like a dog teat. Like a dog teat, okay. Cover it in sugar, and then they'll suck on it. And a cat doesn't care about Legos, gonna walk straight through the Legos. You have Legos and a cat, and I have Legos and a cat. Inky has never shown any interest besides maybe eating them. Well, they're forcing them to walk across them. They're not, they're not like asking them nicely.

Starting point is 00:17:26 They're saying, Hey, here's a room full of Legos. Let's watch how you, how you will distribute your weight. From my experience with cats. I don't think they have the like presence of mind to make those kinds of decisions. If they're shoved into a room full of Legos, I think they're going, what, what, what, what, what? Just all the way across the room.

Starting point is 00:17:42 They're not, they're like, they know what's up. They're like, you're testing me somehow. And I'm not going to play along with this. I'm just going to skitter across the room. They're not, they're like, they know what's up. They're like, you're testing me somehow and I'm not going to play along with this. I'm just going to skitter across the floor. I think I just got to go with the fleshing bacteria because it's just in, like, I can't think of anything else. Hank has sabotaged my brain.

Starting point is 00:18:00 I'm going to just to separate us, go for the dog pacifier. But I also like, I'm trying not to be tricked by the flesh-eating bacteria this is this beacon this lighthouse uh and so you're going for dog pacifier i'm going for dog pacifier i think as a cat owner it's ridiculous i think that the lego thing would be a thing right well streptococcus pyrogenes genus causes stre throat, but it can also cause flesh eating disease called necrotizing fasciitis. Infection begins with the bacteria getting into the body through an opening in the skin where it can begin to attack the connective a toxin called streptolysin S or SLS, which activates pain neurons and causes a lot of pain. It also causes the neuron to release a peptide

Starting point is 00:18:52 into the infected tissue, and that release prevents immune cells from being able to get into the tissue and attacking the bacteria. However, scientists found that they were able to protect the tissue in mice by adding Botox or another compound to block that peptide, allowing the mouse immune system to see the bacteria and take care of it. That was the true fact. Congratulations. What was the game theory behind this truth or fail? You got to ask Deboki. I don't know.

Starting point is 00:19:20 Deboki's twisted game mind. As for story number two, you are right right there's absolutely no truth behind that i think deboki just wanted to look at cats sitting in lego boxes but the first one uh that we've not done this with dogs but it was this was inspired by a very real pain treatment for newborn humans that have to go through medical procedures which is to coat a pacifier with sugar. So in a 1999 study assessing how well this worked, a team of researchers used crying, changes in facial expression, and other changes in newborn behavior to assess how well the sugar coated pacifiers worked. And while the newborns were still experiencing pain, it did seem like

Starting point is 00:20:00 the pacifiers worked pretty quickly, possibly just because it helped divert their attention. So they didn't give them a painkiller in their pacifier. They just put sugar on the pacifiers worked pretty quickly, possibly just because it helped divert their attention. So they didn't give them a painkiller in their pacifier. They just put sugar on the pacifier, shove it in their mouth, and they do the medical procedure they need to do. It would be really cute if dogs had pacifiers, though. Somebody should invent that. Well, Sam, that means that you got your one point

Starting point is 00:20:21 headed into the next round. We're going to take a short break, and then we'll be back for the fact off. Welcome back, everybody. Get ready for the fact talk. Our panelists have brought science facts to present in an attempt to blow my mind. And after they've presented their facts, I will judge them and award Hank Bucks to the one I think will make the best TikTok. But to decide who goes first, I have a trivia question.

Starting point is 00:21:02 Legos are very painful to step on for several reasons our feet have a lot of nerve endings plus legos are able to withstand a tremendous amount of force before breaking which means that when you step on a lego all the force goes into your foot but more than one brave soul has decided to walk barefoot on legos to see how long they can go for according to the guinness book of world records the current winner was set on May 1st, 2021 by Sonny Molina. How far did Molina walk barefoot on Legos for? I imagine once you shut off your brain to the Lego feeling, I guess it depends on what kind of walk.

Starting point is 00:21:39 If you can walk slow, if you have to run, it's going to be bad. But if you can ease the pressure in some way i don't know or like like how people walk on hot coals they get into a mindset yep and then that just lets them do it well let me i'm like five feet like 20 feet okay 20 feet uh i will say well i'm gonna say more than terry so i'll say a hundred feet well since we're operating feet it was 29 000 feet how did they even get that many legos yeah i think maybe i think it maybe was in a circle and he just like went around and around i'm not sure that i don't see how else they could have done that and And apparently it's real bad. The person who held the record before decided to not try and regain his record.

Starting point is 00:22:28 He said, I ended up going to the hospital and had over 100 micro abrasions on both feet. I had no feeling in my feet for weeks. It was insane. So not not fun to walk five and a half miles on Lego. Oh, I feel like I've never heard anybody who had the record break be just or broken just be like ah fuck it i'm out not happening not for me i i i have the plaque they they're not going to come take it away from me also if you run a 10k your friends are like wow congratulations and if you're like i stepped on Legos for 10 kilometers, your friends go, oh, okay.

Starting point is 00:23:09 All right. That means that Sam gets to decide who goes first. Okay. I think I'll go first. Bugs. They can cause people a lot of emotional pain because they're gross. And in some cases, they can also cause physical pain. An ant's bite, a hornet sting, et cetera. And because bugs are just sort of unpleasant to a lot of people

Starting point is 00:23:30 and are also generally unhygienic, people do have a tendency to kill them in lots of horrible ways without really thinking about it all that much. But hey, they're bugs, right? They don't really have like advanced enough brains to feel all of the pain that we inflict on them, do they? Well, a study published in the Proceedings of the pain that we inflict on them, do they? Well, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July of 2020 has potentially

Starting point is 00:23:49 challenged that rationalization. In the experiment that the paper's about, the researchers set up two feeders of different colors filled with sugar water, a yellow one filled with a 40% solution of sugar water, and a pink one filled with some undisclosed less amount than that and let a series of bees feed on them one at a time so once the researchers were good and sure that the bees knew that the yellow feeder contained the tastier drink they put the yellow feeder on a heating pad and set it to 55 celsius aka 131 degrees fahrenheit and that was according to the lead researcher equivalent to like if a human touched a hot plate. But apparently that's not like something that can permanently harm a bee. It's just real hot. And the pink feeder remained unheated. What they observed was that even though

Starting point is 00:24:35 the yellow feeder was crazy hot, the bees still landed at and drank from that one instead of the less sugary pink feeder. And all that might make it sound like bees actually don't really process or care about pain, except that when they turned the heat off and put equally sugary pink feeder. And all that might make it sound like bees actually don't really process or care about pain, except that when they turned the heat off and put equally sugary mixture in both feeders, the bees would not go to the yellow feeder. So what the scientists concluded from this was that since the bees were learning that the yellow feeder hurt,

Starting point is 00:24:58 they were using their brains to process the experience of pain and learn from it and making what's called a motivational trade-off, which is like a known way of processing and making decisions based on pain evidence that things that we know experience pain like human beings use. So the bees basically were doing the mental math to figure out if getting the old hot foot was worth eating better food. And this all adds up to suggest that bees can indeed feel pain. We don't know if they experience it the same way we do, but they seem to experience it and can form behavioral decisions around it. This is the first time that a motivational trade-off behavior was observed in a non-crustacean arthropod. our sensitive lonely little friend the hermit crab also exhibited motivational trade-offs behaviors in a separate experiment where they were electrifying shells and making hermit crabs like

Starting point is 00:25:51 move into electrified shells and that study was enough to get crabs legally declared sentient in the united kingdom so some scientists hope that research like this will help us make decisions around things like insect best insect-based research or insect farming that takes into account the welfare of insects, which is something that human beings traditionally aren't all that great at. So the next time you swat a mosquito or squish a spider, I don't know what you should do. Sometimes you just got to kill a bug. So maybe just forget that I even told you this.

Starting point is 00:26:26 Great. Introduce the moral quandary and then just be like, actually forget everything. I don't. Sarah, what do you have for us? There is a rodent that lives in the deserts of Mexico and the southwestern United States called the grasshopper mouse. And at first glance, it looks pretty ordinary. Its body is around three to five inches long. Its short fur is a sandy brownish white, and it has little paws and relatively big ears and eyes. But behaviorally, it's a little gremlin. And even though it's November now, I have to squeeze in a little more Halloween.

Starting point is 00:27:05 defend its territory it gets up on its hind legs and releases a high-pitched howl scream kind of like a wolf this doesn't have anything to do with pain it just looks very cute and weird but these mice can bite as well as bark they're carnivorous and eat all kinds of crunchy invertebrates like the grasshoppers that give them their name along with crickets beetles tarantulas centipedes and scorpions and the bark scorpion in particular has evolved painful and even deadly toxins for example humans stung by bark scorpions can experience tingling numbness and a sharp pain for one to three days proteins in the venom activate a sodium ion channel called i'm not sure how to say this out loud na so like the chemical symbol for sodium, and then a subscript V, which I assume means voltage or something like that, 1.7 in nociceptive neurons, which kickstarts the sensory

Starting point is 00:27:53 pathway to tell our brain that something ouchy is happening. And in my understanding, when there's tissue damage, this 1.7 channel gets activated a little, but bark venom toxin can target it and activate it a lot. And when a grasshopper mouse gets stung by a bark scorpion, it barely notices and keeps attacking, trying to chomp its dinner. There's a lot we don't know, like why the deadly components of the toxin don't straight up kill them, but a 2013 study shed a bit of light on the pain piece. Specifically, animals have another sodium ion channel called NAV1.8 that helps transmit the nociceptive signal after 1.7 gets activated. And the grasshopper mice have a

Starting point is 00:28:33 two amino acid substitution in their 1.8 protein that lets the channel grab and hold onto the painful venom toxin molecules, preventing the signal from being passed on. So in other words, even though the toxin is activating nociception in the 1.7 channel it's also acting as a pain blocker at the same time in the 1.8 channel so the mice don't feel it or any pain from other substances that the researchers experimentally injected them with like formaldehyde so while this isn't the only mammal that has weirdly intense pain resistance to something it eats i believe this is the first instance of a mammal taking a toxin and turning it into a painkiller all because of a weird nervous system mutation so as long as this scorpion venom is in there they can't like they can't feel any kind of pain yes any kind of pain so like even

Starting point is 00:29:23 though 1.7 gets activated because of i don't know an ouchy or formaldehyde gets injected or saline solution yeah then 1.8 being blocked still removes that domino so no matter whatever whatever knocks down that first domino can't cause pain that's wild so so it's that's like enough to be a problem long term but it's not forever it's only after it's only like while they've been recently stung by a scorpion they's going to berserker mode that'd be amazing i would like wouldn't it be amazing if like if we were that mouse like that mouse became people they'd keep those scorpions in their house to be like i got a headache wink oh right give you a sting and they do look really cool howling they look adorable oh the little little mice howling yeah

Starting point is 00:30:14 yeah that's also very good ah sari that's that's uh very weird so it's either bees making the motivational trade-off to drink extra sugary food even when it's painful, but knowing that it's painful and reacting to that pain, which means maybe they're sentient, or grasshopper mice blocking pain using scorpion venom. Oh, that's hard. People love bees. People love bees, but also these mice howl at the moon. Hey, why not both?

Starting point is 00:30:43 You can never have too many ideas for TikToks. Right? also these mice howl at the moon hey why not both you can never have too many ideas for tiktoks i gotta have to give it to the mice oh i thought sam was the clear winner uh they're cute and also i like the idea of injecting myself with being a large, sentient, you know, sort of civilizational mouse man. Yeah. Injecting myself with, like, keeping a scorpion on the shelf or in the drawer. Yeah. It's a jar full of scorpions. And feeling no pain for a few hours.

Starting point is 00:31:17 Yeah, and then just be like, oh, I'll get you back! Or something. I don't know. What? My daughter's been abducted. Liam Neeson. She's been dyken. That's my Liam Neeson.

Starting point is 00:31:31 That was your Liam Neeson? Yeah, that's right. Now we're going to move on to Ask the Science Couch. I don't know who that means to one, though, because that's, we're going to make it a tie. It's a tie. We got to move on. Congratulations on your tie, everybody. Thank you it's a tie we got to move on congratulations on your tie everybody thank you and now we're gonna move on to ask the science couch we've got a listener question for our finally honed couch of scientific minds amanda 728 asks is it possible that one pain kind of cancels out another pain like if i

Starting point is 00:31:59 stub my toe can i bite my tongue and take my brain off my toe? I do this. I don't know if it works. I also do this. I bite the inside of my cheek really. Like if I stub my toe, I bite the inside of my cheek really hard. Yeah. I usually, I just,

Starting point is 00:32:15 I put my fingernails into my palm. Or like if I have a really bad stomach ache, I'll do stuff like that. I'll just be like, I can't think about my stomach. Yeah. Yeah. It's like a, like it's,

Starting point is 00:32:21 it's not like to override the pain. It's just being like, I'm tired of this one. Let's give it a, let's think about it for a's like a pay. Like it's, it's not like to override the pay. It's just being like, I'm tired of this one. Let's give it a, let's think about it for a second for a while. Sarah, this is very interesting. I don't do it.

Starting point is 00:32:31 I think I'm the weird one now. You just, you just like to suffer. Yeah. I just suffer. I'm just like, uh, my pain.

Starting point is 00:32:39 And then lay down, go get a scorpion. Yeah. Go get a scorpion. Step on it a little bit. Go get some Legos. Yeah. No, that's completely a separate question from whether it does anything yeah um it does it does i'll jump in and so you i i didn't know this is a thing it's called conditioned pain modulation or cpm and it is studied by neuro biologists, neuroscientists, and it's considered

Starting point is 00:33:08 a psychophysical paradigm, which I think is interesting. It's like, how do you distract your brain from the body pain that's, that's happening. And I have linked a YouTube video in the show flow. It's 11 minutes long, but I watched it on two times speed to show a traditional like procedure for it and to summarize it it's usually you have a subject experience short bursts of painful things whether it's a hot pad on their arm or a pressure point on one of their muscles like a sharp pressure or sticking their hand in a cold bath or an electric shock or something like that low voltage and you have them rate their experience of pain for each one individually and then you have them do two at once and when they do two at

Starting point is 00:33:59 once repeated experiments have shown that their perception of pain drops in the second one so like by sticking your hand in cold water the hot heat feels less painful or the the pressure pushed on your muscle feels less painful does that work for my emotions as well? You know, I might as well. They have done studies on how distraction affects pain. And that has a similar effect to doing two painful things at once. So my recommendation here is to not hurt yourself more. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:46 Yeah. That's going to be, that's going to be a big caveat to all of this. Yeah. Don't take a cold shower. That'll be probably equally as distracting as that would actually damage tissue. And you don't necessarily need it to be also painful.

Starting point is 00:35:02 So you don't need to distract from sadness with another sad emotion there is research that has shown of like high cognitive intensity so i think in in many cases it's like doing puzzles or doing something that you're engaged in uh so you can't be zoning out and like half doodling you have to be focused on the thing. Then that can reduce your sensation of pain. Also heating pads. Nice heat. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:35:34 Anything to make you feel cozy. Yeah. Cozy and safe. If you want to ask the science couch, your question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we'll tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes every week, or you can join the SciShow Tangangents Patreon and ask us on Discord.

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Starting point is 00:37:02 But, one more thing. Sea turtle shells are bony structures covered in keratinous scales called scutes with some nerve endings throughout the tissue. So when a sea turtle collides with a boat, it probably feels pretty freaking unpleasant. And besides the pain, its shell can get damaged so that air pockets form underneath the bone in what's sometimes called bubble butt syndrome i don't like this oh these it's out they shouldn't have made it sound so nice i shouldn't have made it sound so freaking funny yeah it sounds like fun good but it does sound fun yeah but these air pockets throw off the turtle's buoyancy and its ability to dive beneath the surface of the ocean. So wildlife rehabilitators try to keep a close eye out for bubble butts on injured turtles because they probably won't survive long by themselves.

Starting point is 00:37:56 Do they literally have a big booty or do they have, is it just microscopic? It's like a bubble under their shell. It's pretty substantial. And you can see them kind of tilt in the water because their buoyancy is all messed up. Sometimes the butt facts are sad. We can have a funny, painful butt fact. Oh, we had the butt fact about the seals

Starting point is 00:38:18 getting their butts eaten by seagulls. That was hilarious. The baby seals getting their butt seen.

SciShow Tangents - Pain

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