About Terry Borsook

Personal:

I am married with 2 amazing kids, a boy who is 6.5 and a girl who is almost 4. I love hot weather, the outdoors, exploring places I've never been, playing with my kids, discussing cool ideas, Korean food (the spicier the better), and many other things.

Professional:

I'm almost finished my Ph.D. in Psychology at the University of Toronto. My research revolves around the study of pain, especially "endogesia", which is a term I coined to refer to the induction of pain relief via the body's own built-in pain control systems. The well-known placebo effect is a great example of endogesia.

I am especially interested in 2 areas:

1) understanding systems, and particularly how feedback contributes to pain; and to use this understanding to develop novel pain treatments that target and manipulate feedback.

2) ecological studies that study people in their everyday lives, instead of bringing them into a lab and exposing them to artificial conditions. New technologies are now enabling us to ask questions we could never even dream of asking before.

I've also recently gotten involved in working on electronics projects with biosensor technologies (heart rate, temp, movement, etc.) using Arduino programmable microcontrollers (lotsa fun!). My aim is to give these out to people living with pain in order to automatically collect psychophys data.