"The current work started when Nitsan Goldstein, who was a graduate student in Betley’s lab at the time, found that other urgent survival needs such as thirst and fear can also reduce enduring pain. That finding supported behavioral models developed in collaboration with the Kennedy lab at Scripps, suggest filtering of sensory input at the parabrachial nucleus can block out long-lasting pain when other more acute needs exist.

“That told us the brain must have a built-in way of prioritizing urgent survival needs over pain, and we wanted to find the neurons responsible for that switch,” says Goldstein."