Brain Fact Friday ”Chronic Pain and the Brain: Is it All in Your Head?”

Welcome back to The Neuroscience Meets Social and Emotional Learning Podcast, where we cover the science-based evidence behind social and emotional learning (for schools) and emotional intelligence training (in the workplace) aligning our lives to the most current brain research. This week's Brain Fact Friday will explore:✔ How neuroscience is a new field of study--where it began in academics in 1960, and where it is today.✔ How fMRI scans changed the way we can look at and study the brain.✔ Where advancements in neuroscience are going (in education and other sectors).✔ How fMRI scans can help us to learn more about chronic pain and disease. IMAGE CREDIT: PAGE 51 of National Geographic's June 10, 2022 Issue on The Brain: Discover the Way Your Mind Works. I’m Andrea Samadi, an author, and educator with a passion for learning specifically on the topics of health, wellbeing and productivity, and launched this podcast to share how important an understanding of our brain is for our everyday life and results--whether we are a teacher or student in the classroom, or in working the modern workplace. This season, Season 8 of the podcast, and our third year of creating content, I wanted to take a deeper dive into the importance of brain health since this 3 pound organ of remarkable matter that we all have, our brain, literally controls everything for us.  We all have a brain, but it still boggles my mind that we were never taught how to use it. We have now entered this “new era of neuroscience”[i] where we are gaining a deeper understanding of what makes us human, and the latest breakthroughs in science that can propel us all forward in ways we never could without the latest discoveries in science. When we think about how new these concepts are, this topic is truly fascinating, and I can understand why there is so much interest in this podcast, along with others of the same theme. Who wouldn’t want to know the latest secrets of the brain, and how they are relevant to our daily life?   This topic is a relatively new field of study, where the first academic departments that focused on studying neuroscience didn’t begin until the 1960s, and then “for the next 40 years, brain science was hyper-focused on establishing the basics like What is a neuron? How do brain cells communicate with each other? What are the brain’s functional areas that map onto behaviors?” (National Geographic, page 5) This solid foundation does help us to learn about different parts of the brain and uncover their functions, but I’m sure that you are like me, and have more questions that there are answers for when it comes to uncovering the mysteries within our brain. When fMRI scans came about in the early 2000s, this changed the way we could look at the activity within the brain, and advancements in our understanding took a fast track, going far beyond just what we could see looking at the brain through a microscope. I’ve mentioned it before on this podcast, that in the early days of studying neuroscience, we went from seeing research that was focused on different parts of the brain (like the amygdala or hypothalamus) to seeing entire networks in the brain as technology advanced.  Studies became focused more on the neural pathways, or the interconnected brain, bringing to light that when we take an action, it’s not just one part of the brain we should consider, but the “immense networks of the brain working together, sometimes across blurred borders and multiple functions.” (National Geographic, Page 6, The Interconnected Brain). It’s taken some time (well, it’s taken over 60 years since those early academics began studying neuroscience) but we are now finally seeing positions in the field of education turn up in certain states where leaders like Dr. Lori Desautels[ii], an Assistant Professor at Butler University, just shared that in her state (Indiana) schools that were just a few years ago beginning to add social and emotional learning department heads,