How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure? | Quanta Magazine
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How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure?
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The Joy of Why
How Does Touch Lead To Pain Or Pleasure?
By
Janna Levin
and
Steven Strogatz
August 6, 2026
Neuroscientist Ishmail Abdus-Saboor discusses efforts to understand how skin contact can be painful or pleasurable, and what touch-obsessed naked mole rats might teach us about human social behavior.
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Chanelle Nibbelink for Quanta Magazine
Introduction
Authors
Janna Levin
Contributing Columnist
Steven Strogatz
Podcast Host
August 6, 2026
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biology
neurons
neuroscience
perception
The Joy of Why
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Pain and pleasure seem like simple facts of life, however they are anything but that. Neuroscientists still cannot say why physical pain differs from psychological pain, for instance, or why a loved one’s touch soothes while a stranger’s touch repels.
To explore the science behind these sensations, Janna Levin talked to Ishmail Abdus-Saboor, a neuroscientist at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Institute. Their conversation covers how pain serves an evolutionary purpose, how researchers measure pain and pleasure in the lab despite the absence of any objective biomarker, and how touch functions as a social and emotional signal, not just a sensory one. Abdus-Saboor also describes his work with naked mole rats — a species that barely feels pain, shows no signs of aging, and lives in colonies built almost entirely on touch — and the ethical trade-offs when studying sensations in animals that cannot describe what they feel.
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Transcript
[Music plays]
JANNA LEVIN: Hello. Hello out there, I’m Janna Levin.
STEVE STROGATZ: And I’m Steve Strogatz.
LEVIN: And this is The Joy of Why.
STROGATZ: A podcast from Quanta Magazine in which we explore some of the biggest unanswered questions in math and science today.
LEVIN: So Steve, we’ve been talking with Ishmail Abdus-Saboor who’s a professor here at Columbia [University], not a few blocks from me, about skin as an organ and as a vehicle for transmitting both pleasure and pain.
STROGATZ: Mm-hmm. That sounds very interesting.
LEVIN: Yeah. I think it’s interesting that very little is known about pain. I mean, if you think about your own experience, it’s kind of strange when you start to meditate on it. What is it exactly, right? It’s very unpleasant, but other than that, what is it?
STROGATZ: It’s really mysterious, especially when you have pain that doesn’t really relate to tissue damage. Like, sometimes I’ll just be washing something at the sink in the kitchen, and then suddenly I have pain, and I think, “Come on, that’s ridiculous. I didn’t do anything to my back.” And, you know, people will tell you pain is mental. You can sort of talk yourself out of certain pain, which raises the point that pain is not as simple as it might seem at first.
LEVIN: Yeah, and in particular, he studies this at the level of animals. But it’s one of these things that’s very hard for animals to tell you reliably what they’re experiencing. So, a lot of his work is really trying to interpret the animal’s interiority, the animal’s experience of different sensations.
I was very fascinated about biology and biological systems and how animals communicate and cooperated.
STROGATZ: Yeah, I wondered as you were describing this work, is it touch as a means to learn about interiority, or is touch the primary object of interest here?
LEVIN: I mean, I think that that’s an interesting question. Like, with many scientific ambitions, sure, maybe the big goal is consciousness, right? But no, the big goal is always very far off. That’s not the language in which they’re operating.
The language in which they’re operating is data, observations. You know, it’s more immediate to their experiments.
STROGATZ: Well, right. They say science is the art of the solvable, and so we’re trying to restrict ourselves to things where we can make advances, make real progress.
But I have to say, I got a little bit of a queasy feeling when you mentioned pleasure and pain, especially as a person with an animal at home. My dog, Murray, that I love so much.
LEVIN: Yes, I’ve heard about Murray.
STROGATZ: I know. I’m sure everyone...