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Dr. Lowe, from In the Pipeline, writes:
Not to get too philosophical, but all our physical sensations from the outside world have to be mediated by some sort of receptor in our own bodies. Heat, cold, pressure, pain, pleasure – these are all constructs of our mental processing, but they (generally!) have physical referents. Our sensation of eyesight, for example, is a mental construct, with rather large and specially formed brain regions dedicated to it, but these layers of neurons are responding to impulses coming up the optic nerve, which in turn are set off by the receptors in the retina and their behavior when various wavelength of light hit them. Going further, those rhodopsin receptors are changing shape as retinal molecules isomerize when light hits them – vision comes down to a cis/trans double bond switch; that the spring from which everything flows, the first domino in the mighty chain.
The same goes for all our other physical sensations. The TRPV family of ion channels, for example, is what mediates the taste sensations of garlic and hot peppers, and contribute (as you'd figure) to feelings of heat and pain. The TRPM family is all over the place, but TRPM8 is responsible for the sensation of cold (and for the "cool" sensation of menthol, eucapyltol, and other compounds). In the same way that rhodopsin is balanced on a knife edge, to be tipped over by light hitting it, TRPM8 is similarly balanced so that its conformation changes as the temperature drops, which sets off changes in calcium flux and further messages inside the cells where it's expressed.
[...] So this area would be a good example to bring up when it's time to talk about how complex human biology gets, and how much we don't know about it. Everything from "I feel cold" or "Boy, that's a spicy Thai curry" to a whole list of serious diseases is tied together, in ways that are only partly understood, and which are obscured by big piles of functionality that we don't know anything about at all.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2017/06/09/the-great-untangling
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14 2017, @01:15AM
We've already done that to animals in labs. They all waste away to death by pressing the pleasure button and never doing anything else. It'll be easy to create a slave class of humans controlled by embedded pain/pleasure controls. We already train pets this way as well as many humans too.