While reading the pain tolerance thread in this forum, I got to thinking about something I’ve often wondered before: What makes pain unpleasant? Isn’t it simply information before the senses? If I’m mentally prepared, can I experience great pain without passing out? What good does passing out, while in great pain, do?
On a side note: If I were to inflict great pain upon myself to contemplate pain, is there a way I could do so without causing permanent damage or scarring to myself. It may sound wierd, but I figure that being in great pain and pondering why it’s unpleasant would be enlightening. However, I don’t want to end up with nasty scars.
–Max the Immortal
Who hopes he doesn’t seem wierd for posting this…
Here are some things you can do to inflict great pain on yourself, and leave no scars:
1: Cut through your fingernail widthwise into the nailbed with a sharp razor blade. The nail will eventually grow out and the cut will grow away with it.
2: Put your hand in really hot (not boiling though) water.
3: Stick your nose into a jar of mustard, and inhale deeply.
4: Stretch a thin elastic band across your cheek with 2 fingers, pull it back in a slingshot fashion with the other hand, and let it snap back onto your cheek. Leaves a nice welt and stings like crazy.
5: Cut up some nice hot fresh habanero peppers, making sure to get lots of the heat chemical on your hands, and then go use the bathroom without washing them.
That should get you started… Although if you actually do any of these things, have yourself committed after the experiment is finished.
Pain is natures way of saying “HEY STOP WHAT YOUR DOING” before you really hurt yourself or before you hurt yourself further. Anybody who did not feel pain was unpleasent would probably take himself out of the gene pool.
Passing out does seem conterproductive to survival but there must be more instances where passing out prevents you from doing further harm to yourself than prevents you from escaping danger.
I know a person who feels almost no pain and he does all kinds of stupid crap like put cigaretts out on his arm. Most people are smarter than that but I notice I will try to tolarate pain and continue to work as long as possible or not drop a hot plate or cup until the pain forces me to.
Why does pain hurt? Because that’s its definition. If it didn’t hurt, it wouldn’t be painful.
So why does anything hurt? Because if you didn’t notice that you were hurting, you would keep doing something until you died. Take cigarette smoking for instance…
Why do you pass out? Because while pain is indicative of something being wrong, often times your body just can’t do anything about the pain and it realizes this. Sometimes, the best way to deal with pain is to ignore it until it gets better. Passing out lets you do this.
Now why would someone named Max the Immortal be worried about a little thing like pain, anyway?
Pain, at some level, means cells are being damaged. It is not just information before the sense, but chemicals such as histamines and kinins which are well known “inflammatory mediators”. Passing out helps make severe pain more bearable and may help raise blood pressures in cases of shock, but probably doesn’t due much for the actual trigger.
As for your borderline tendencies, there are lots of ways to hurt yourself and leave no evidence. Scars of small width and well apposed edges (no rough spots) heal well. Pulling out all your hair (trichtillomania) is only noticable in the short term. Nails are a good bet, as pointed out. Low voltage electricity, overdoses, listening to Abba and watching most sitcoms might do it for you too, sickie.
As indicated prior, some people lack the nerves to feel pain and they are in great danger of hurting themselves. Pain is part of the plan of nature and serves a useful function. Pain can be overrode, however, by greater emotions. Apparently, in those instances the nerve paths of pain are blocked by other nerve messages, such as pleasure. I’m referring here to masochists, who obviously undergo certain acts that would be painful to us, and would be painful to them too, except that the sexual pleasure they get overrides the pain, and they feel no pain until sexual release. I don’t know if this is caused by, as I said, an overriding nerve message, or if the pain message itself is somehow blocked by some other means.
I ate a fresh habenero just today. It really is a good way to experience non-damaging pain.
I remember seeing pictures of (buddhist?) monks who had killed themselves by setting themselves on fire. In the pictures, they were just sitting there like normal meditation while burning. I’ll look around for the pics on the web. I saw them in a history book back in highschool.
Hmm… I recall reading a medical story about a rare form of shellfish poisoning. One of its distinctive symptoms is the reversal of hot and cold sensation. People would touch a cold object like a piece of ice and feel like their hand was on fire. They called it sensory reversal. Apparently the phenomenon only lasts a couple of days.
Pain is a product of evolution. If, for example, your body suffers no pain when you fall out of a tree, you are more likely to be careless when playing in a tree than someone who feels pain. You are more likely to fall and to die. I, who suffers pain, am more likely to pass the pain trait on to my children.
I’m gonna blow the spelling here, and this is all unsubstantiated memory here…
There is a chemical in the body called “Bradykinin” that is what causes the pain nerves to fire. It has been synthesized, and the application of it to the skin causes instant, intense pain. To much will actually cause heart attacks from body response.
Interesting stuff… I like to think that someday, folks will figure out that a dilution of this stuff would be the second greatest crowd control device ever…
Just to clarify:
I know the evolutionary advantages of pain. I’m not asking about that. I’m just wondering if our typical reaction to pain is a learned response that can be overridden, or something more powerful than that. I’m curious as to why pain can cause fainting, heart attacks, and the like.
The definitive work on pain, beloved of anaesthesiologists, is a monster tome by McGill professors Melzack and Wall. I’ll see what it has to say on the subject. Pain in humans is clearly innate, the response has both a spontaneous and a learned component. Whether you could override it depends on the context of the pain, I would guess.
