Sorry if the title isn’t completely explanatory, but what I mean is, (inspired by something I JUST did) have you ever done something like stub your toe reall, REALLY hard and instead of getting immediate blinding pain, nothing happens for like .75 to 1.0 seconds?
You know it’s coming, and sure enough it does!
But, there is no shock, no life or death situation that keeps you from feelling the pain immediately You just bang something really hard and know it’s gonna hurt like a bitch, but for some strange reason it doesn’t do so at once.
I did a search on “delayed pain” but didn’t find anything useful.
Yes, nerves are way, way slower than electrical impusles in wires. In fact, they are very slow by most standards. The fastest nerve impulses travel at over 200 mph but most aren’t that fast. The pain pathways from foot to brain travel only 2 - 3 feet a second and that results in the lag as the signal has to travel all the way up your body.
“Some kinds of signals, like the ones for muscle position travel on extra-fast nerve impulses at speeds of up to 390 feet per second (119 meter/second). Close your eyes and wave your arms around: you can tell where they are at every moment because the muscle-position nerves are very fast… But other messages, like some kinds of pain signals travel much more slowly. If you stub your toe, you feel the pressure right away because touch signals travel at 250 feet per second. But you won’t feel the pain for another two or three seconds, because pain signals generally travel an only two feet per second.”
I think that the brain realizes that you just screwed up before the pain actually registers. Though I don’t know what the phenomenon is.
It almost seems like the brain goes into a second or two or three of shock, before the pain actually hits.
I’ve done quite a bit of construction, and mechanical work on cars. Sometimes you don’t even notice that you might be bleeding. At least that’s how my body works.
That doesn’t mean “Dont’t answer me any more,” just a thankx for the responses so far. I have some stuff to check out, as per the above. Nice to know that my system seems to be wired approximately correctly for earth-normal humans!