Cooling neurons in the laboratory silences them, but upon rewarming, they exhibit hyperactivity and rebound with greater pain intensity, suggesting cooling may be detrimental for pain management.

“if we want to kill neurons or silence neurons, we cool them. This is a well-known tool in the laboratory. Some of the early and most important studies in neuroscience that formed the basis for the textbooks were lowering a cooling probe into a particular area of the brain or a peripheral nerve in order to shut down that nerve, so the cooling will shut down the nerve, but another very well-known fact in neuroscience text books is that when the activity of the nerve pathway or neurons comes back, there's what's called homeostatic plasticity, that it rebounds with greater pain, with a higher level of intensity, which in the pain system would equate to greater pain.”