Dr. Sanjay Gupta

It'll kind of do whatever you ask it to do.

So if you're hyper-focused on the pain, you're firing neurons together, and they're going to wire together, and that's going to reinforce the memory loop.

What is, I think, fascinating about pain is that pain circuits travel, and they go through all these various areas.

Your amygdala, which is your emotional center, it tends to be larger in patients who are in chronic pain.

Their prefrontal cortex tends to be smaller.

So their judgment and things like that tend to not be as good because their prefrontal cortex is shrunk to some extent.

But it also goes through the hippocampus, which is your memory store.

So you might start to really remember it well, right?

Your past experiences with pain, you remember those and they may amplify your current episode with pain.

So every time you start to have a twinge of pain, it's like, man, it just like skyrockets.

It's like it just went from zero to 100 just like that.

And I've seen this in patients, even like in real time.

They'll be in my office and they'll sort of be there.

And then all of a sudden they're cringing.

Nothing happened to them.

It wasn't like they fell or anything.

They're just sitting there.

What is going on there?

Why has that suddenly gone from zero to 100 or from 10 to 100?

A lot of that is because this very complicated sort of loop of pain circuitry, including memory.