Does everybody has a “pain threshold,” beyond which he cannot take any more? For example, if someone is being tortured, is there a point at which anyone will do or say anything, just to stop the pain? And what happens, physiologically and emotionally, when the pain continues beyond that point? Is there a point beyond which the brain simply cannot accommodate additional pain . . . so once it reaches that point it simply plateaus? I’m ruling out scenarios in which the person passes out or dies . . . or are those outcomes inevitable?
Not to be nitpicky, but people often misuse the term “pain threshold” and this is another example of that. The pain threshold is the minimum amount of stimulation required to sense pain, not a higher level of it. The closest term to what you are describing is pain tolerance which varies by person and the type of pain involved.
From what I have heard and experienced, extreme pain will cause the brain’s natural opiates to kick in to dull the sensation. If it is bad enough like with someone undergoing true torture, the person will eventually gray out, black out, or experience some degree of dissociation from their body. Prisoners of war often report those things.
Everyone will break under torture. Some may resist longer than others but awhile back we had lengthy debates on torture here and having read a lot on the subject all experienced with this agree it is not a matter of if but when a person will break. Unfortunately the broken person becomes a highly unreliable source of information so kinda useless for that task.
Forget the movie image of the stoic hero making smartass comments to his torturer. That guy would be a basket case in short order in real life.
Is that a given though? I don’t have a cite handy, but I remember reading that guerilla fighters who have been trained on what to expect if they are captured and tortured tend to have lower rates of PTSD than those who lack that training. This would suggest that there are ways to at least mitigate the long-term damage psychologically.
Everybody has a limit. l spent some time in interrogation… once.
They make it hard on you?
They don’t make it easy. Yeah, it was unpleasant. l held out as long as l could. All the stuff they tried. You just can’t hold out for ever.
How’d they finally get to you?
They gave me a grasshopper.
What’s a grasshopper?
That’s two part gin, two part brandy, one part crème de menthe…
CMC fnord!
Don’t forget to factor into this that (AIUI) how you react to pain is as much a learned, and un-learnable, response as it is physical one. See; sub-incision, G. Gordon Liddy’s fire trick, etc.