Pay Attention: Your Body Is Listening.

How paying attention to an itch may change the immune response beneath it

By Jess Wight | August 27, 2026

“I’ve studied humans for more than 20 years, and this was the most striking effect I’ve ever seen.”

Dr. Liron Rozenkrantz, assistant professor at the university’s Azrieli Faculty of Medicine, and supervisor of the Nature study published this week, discussing the exciting new research

When you feel an itch, most often your first instinct is to ignore it; you know you ought to distract yourself and the irritation should subside. For decades, science has supported this idea: diverting your attention lowers the perception of pain. A 2002 study demonstrated that when the brain is concentrating heavily on a task, it reduces the processing of incoming pain signals. A later study from 2012 then used fMRI brain imaging to explore the mechanism more, uncovering that when your mind is busy with a task, it engages descending pathways in the spinal cord to filter out pain signals before they reach your conscious mind.

In a simplistic sense, your attention is limited: When you become deeply distracted by a demanding task, your brain has fewer resources available to process the pain signal. This same logic can be applied to an itch, whether that be from an insect bite, an allergic reaction, or just dry skin.  

But what if the amount of attention we pay to an itch can influence more than just our perception. New research published this week by neuroscientists Mizrachi, Rottem and Rozenkrantz uncovered a deeper, more complicated relationship between attention and our body’s response to it. We usually think of attention as something that changes our experience of the body, not the deeper processes occurring within. If you focus on an itch, you notice it more. If you distract yourself, you notice it less. The inflammation causing the itch should presumably carry on regardless.

However, Mizrachi and colleagues have made a fascinating discovery changing our understanding of how sensory information is connected to the attention we pay it. While looking away might make you feel less discomfort in the moment, data shows that focusing directly on the physical sensation can trigger something remarkable deep within your body: it can help your immune system regulate inflammation far more effectively.

The researchers aimed to investigate whether conscious focus remains inside the brain, or whether it can send biological instructions throughout the body. Our immune system is one of the body’s complex systems we cannot consciously or systematically control. Unlike muscles or breathing, we cannot simply choose to “strengthen” our immune response. We are able to support its normal function through healthy lifestyle choices such as eating a balanced diet, getting enough sleep, and remaining physically active. Beyond these foundational habits, the immune system largely regulates itself in response to the needs and challenges of the body.  

Health professionals have suggested there are some psychological factors which can influence immunity, including the role of mindfulness for reducing stress and enhancing emotional health. Stress can increase levels of inflammation due to rises in stress hormones like cortisol – this is associated with a range of diseases as well as a general increase in susceptibility to infections. A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis shows that mindfulness practices such as meditation can significantly reduce stress perception, as well as influencing physiological markers like cortisol.

Psychoneuroimmunology is the study of interactions between thoughts and behaviors, the nervous system, and the immune system. It recognizes that these systems are not separate from one another: psychological experiences can trigger changes in the nervous and hormone systems, which in turn influence immune activity. This helps to explain why looking after our mental health and wellbeing through practices like mindfulness and healthy lifestyle habits can support the internal balance our body strives for to remain healthy.

To deepen our understanding of this relationship, Mizrachi and colleagues conducted three separate rigorous trials. By deliberately triggering a small inflammatory reaction in the participant’s skin, they were able to measure acute skin inflammation responses under two conditions: attentional distraction, and voluntary attention. Participants were asked to either focus their mind away from the affected area, or to gently focus directly on the physical sensations on their skin.

As expected, those who paid attention to the inflammation were more engaged with the sensation, however the biological findings were striking: their skin actually became less inflamed. In those focusing on the site of irritation, the inflammatory response was both smaller and faster to resolve than those whose attention was directed elsewhere.

Arguably even more fascinatingly, participants who reported stronger itching and burning sensations experienced a smaller physical inflammatory response, hinting at the possibility that attention could play a regulatory role in the body’s immune response.  

We often treat the immune system like a car in cruise control – believing it drives itself while our conscious mind just sits in the passenger seat enjoying the view. But this study shows our mind is actually holding a co-pilot steering wheel, actively sending live signals that can help guide the cellular healing process. It suggests there is a direct, real-time feedback loop between top-down cognitive focus and cellular immune cascades.

It is important to note that the “mind over matter” theory can be misinterpreted as a placebo effect. If people believe paying attention to their bodies will change something, perhaps they somehow feel better without any actual differences occurring physiologically.

However, that certainly isn’t the case for this study. Researchers didn’t rely on participants to report how inflamed they felt. They induced a small, controlled inflammatory response in the skin using a histamine skin-prick test, and then measured what happened to the inflammation. The key measurement was the size of the wheal – the raised, swollen area produced by the immune response – and they tracked it repeatedly over the following 20 minutes.

A particularly robust control was also built into the study design: the same participants carried out both conditions. Sometimes they were asked to pay attention to the sensations at the site of inflammation, and sometimes they were asked to direct their attention elsewhere. Counterbalancing the order in which participants experienced each condition ensured researchers weren’t simply comparing a group of believers and a group of sceptics.

The measurable difference observed in the immune responses in the two conditions was stark: inflammation was around 30% smaller under internal attention and demonstrated significantly faster movement back towards baseline than distracted individuals. Not only were these results striking, they were also observed in over 90% of participants.

Following this, the researchers then did something very important to consolidate these findings: they repeated the experiment with a different group of participants and removed the potential alternative explanation. In the first experiment, the distraction group involved watching videos, whereas in the second experiment, both conditions involved looking at exactly the same sequence of shapes. The difference was simply what participants were doing with their attention: noticing their bodily sensations or performing a mental task about the shapes. This experiment yielded the same effect as the first.

This is clear evidence that this isn’t simply “I believe my body is healing, therefore I report feeling better”. Measurable changes occurred following direct attention to the sensations. This is what makes the findings so intriguing – participants weren’t instructed to consciously tell their immune systems to ‘reduce inflammation’, they were simply directing their attention. Yet that voluntary shift was accompanied by a change in an immune response that was previously assumed to be largely automatic and outside of conscious control.

The mind wasn’t merely changing the experience of the immune response. It was changing the response itself.

One objective concern for these exciting findings is that deliberately focusing on an itch or a burn may make you notice it more, and could ultimately lead to preoccupation and even elevated anxiety and stress. In fact, this was partly the case – individuals did perceive the inflammatory sensations more when the focused on them, but this was not coupled with anxiety.

Researchers measured several indicators of physiological arousal, including heart rate, skin conductance and skin temperature, as well as participants’ own ratings of anxiety. None of these measures differed between conditions, indicating increased awareness did not turn into stress or panic.

This study directly contradicts the idea that the goal should always be to tune out uncomfortable bodily sensations. It is often instinct to distract from an itch or pain because an abundance of literature shows distraction can drastically reduce sensations; a 2021 study reported participants rated stimuli as 42% more intense when attended closely compared to when distracted with a video game.

However, this study suggests that noticing something more intensely and making the underlying physiological response worse are not necessarily the same thing. In fact, they reported internal attention was accompanied by increased heart-rate variability (HRV), a measure associated with parasympathetic activity.

The parasympathetic nervous system is the part of the autonomic nervous system regulates the body’s quieter, restorative functions. One of the major pathways in this system, the vagus nerve, connects the brain with organs throughout the body and helps regulate automatic bodily functions such as heart rate and digestion. Mizrachi and colleagues suggest that this may be one route through which attention can influence inflammation, as they describe vagal activation as a “well-established neural route for anti-inflammatory control”.

There is some precedent for this idea in meditation research. A small experimental study found tat a form of meditation emphasizing inward attention increased high-frequency HRV, which researchers interpreted as a shift toward greater parasympathetic activity. Another small study in 2012 also found increased high-frequency HRV during nondirective meditation, providing further evidence that meditation can influence the parasympathetic nervous system. This suggests deliberate shifting into a meditative state can alter the body’s autonomic regulation.

Mizrachi and colleagues’ new study suggests a potentially fascinating connection. They did not ask participants to engage in meditation, and they didn’t ask them to deliberately activate their vagus nerve either. They were simply asked to pay attention to the sensations produced by an inflammatory response, and yet this was accompanied by increased parasympathetic vagal activity along side a smaller, faster-resolving inflammatory response.

In other words, meditation may not be the important part – attention itself may be. Meditation gives us a familiar example of deliberately directing attention inward; this study suggests that doing so may have consequences that extend beyond our subjective experience and into the body’s physiological regulation, strengthening the power of meditation as a practice.

Overall, perhaps the most interesting takeaway from this research is how it challenges the idea that the immune system operates completely independently of our conscious experience. We tend to divide the body into functions we can control and others we can’t: we can move a muscle or change our breathing, but we cannot consciously tell an immune cell what to do.

This research suggests the boundary may be less rigid than once interpreted. Attention is something we experience as entirely mental. It could be described as the spotlight of the mind: moving from one thing to another as we process sensations, thoughts, and experiences. But this study suggests that where we direct that spotlight may also send signals in the other direction to the nervous system, and ultimately, into the processes regulating our body.

“We already know that the brain can affect immunity through stress, expectations, conditioning, and the autonomic nervous system. But this study goes a step further by showing that attention, something we can actively control, can change an ongoing immune response.”

Asya Rolls, professor of neuroscience at Tel Aviv University, discussing how this study has opened up new possibilities in the realm of treatment options based on the brain-immune system interactions

This also gives us a new perspective on practices such as meditation. We often approach meditation as a tool for changing the mind: becoming calmer, less reactive, or more aware. But if attention can influence autonomic and immune activity, then the effects of deliberately directing our attention inward may extend much further than how we feel in the moment. Paying attention to the body isn’t simply a way of experiencing it more clearly; it could also be one of the ways the brain communicates with it.