Experiencing Pain As Music – New Frontiers Of Pain Relief

The discovery of a gene, possibly crucial to pain relief, opens up new vistas of treatment, enabling us to experience pain as music.

For the gene seems to be involved in cross-sensory activation, a phenomenon known as synesthesia. It is a condition that leads to sensations of one kind being perceived as another - like words or numbers perceived as colours – say number 7 as the colour yellow – or colours heard as music.


The discovery was a result of Australian-Austrian collaboration. Dr Greg Neely of the Garvan Institute of Medical Research, led the project with Professor Josef Penninger, while at the Institute of Molecular Biotechnology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. The research was published in a recent issue of Cell.

Experiencing Pain As Music – New Frontiers Of Pain Relief