Brain Fact Friday: PART 2 on ”Chronic Pain and the Brain: It IS All in Your Head”

<p>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) with tools, ideas and strategies that we can all use for increased results.</p> <p>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 in the classroom, or in the modern workplace.</p> <p>For today’s EPISODE #232 and Brain Fact Friday, I wanted to stay on the theme of chronic pain and disease as we prepare to speak with Dr. Ashok Gupta<a href='#_edn1'>[i]</a> next week, a well-known Neuroplasticity "brain retraining" expert who has spent the last 25 years researching the effects of the brain and the mind on chronic pain and illness. I have so many questions for him, and hope you will tune into this next episode where I know he will answer everything, and give us all a solid plan for how to move forward to live healthier, more productive lives with our brain in mind.</p> <p>After posting last week’s Brain Fact Friday, where we looked at chronic pain and the brain, asking “is it all in our head” I received many messages, including one from cognitive neuroscience researcher John Harmon, from EPISODE #170<a href='#_edn2'>[ii]</a> who added to our post on LinkedIn, saying that “most neuroscientists who study pain say it IS in the brain. And beliefs about bodily pain -- such as "I think this treatment will reduce my pain" -- are (obviously) in the brain also. There is a very real physical connection between pain perception and one's beliefs, emotion, attitudes and the rest of the mind.” He sums this all up saying, “If the mind (including pain and thoughts and beliefs about it) = a set of functional neural networks, it’s easy to see how the mind can either a