There's a lot of interesting stuff in this article and I came back to the comments on this to see if the discourse had corrected itself. Instead people are still taking affront (why?) to the article being an interview of a researcher, even though they are the common thread to a bunch of really interesting research. Here's some interesting things I'd like people to chime in on:<p>> We are also super excited about how the brain controls the transition from acute to chronic pain. We use our pain scale to measure the pain level in a mouse and then take a snapshot of the mouse’s brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging. We image the animals every day to find brain activity patterns that underlie the transition from acute to chronic pain. Once we find them, we can try to change them to alter the course of chronic pain. We’re interested in the emotional as well as sensory components of this pain.<p>> When we activated neurons through the skin on the mice’s backs, the animals behaved as if they were being stroked there. That launched the whole project. We did a lot more behavioral tests and traced the pathway for social touch from the skin to the spinal cord to the reward centers in the brain.<p>> What if we could turn on these neurons with a skin cream to improve mental health — say, to offset the harm caused by social isolation or to treat anxiety or depression? When I gave a talk about this in December, the psychiatrists and neuropharmacologists in the audience were very enthusiastic about the therapeutic potential.<p>> We’re also interested in them because mole rats do not feel some forms of pain. For example, they show no pain response to the molecule capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot peppers, which is quite painful to most mammals. They have receptors in their skin that respond to capsaicin, so I hypothesize that the animals have brain pathways that shut down the pain. If we can find and tap into those signals, we might find a new way to block pain.<p>They are taking a multidisciplinary approach to researching an understudied field, and it's fascinating. Why is no-one else seeing that?