You have two people: same gender, same age, same basic general health. Shoot them both in the foot with a .22. (It’s okay. Hypotheical bullets.) One of them can deal with the tramua and pain much better than the other.
Why are some people better able to deal with physical/ mental pain than others? Why are some people even able to perceive pain differently in different circumstances?
An example of the latter: my uncle John-John used to be a three sports letterman back in high school. Basketball, football, baseball. A fanatic. Used to be injured on occassion – a family legend that gets told every year at Thanksgiving is how he stoically played on without complaint for twenty minutes of the state championship with a broken wrist.
My cousin likes to say, “Yeah, but that same year, John-John broke a toe falling down some steps and cried like a b-tch. Remember that?”
So is pain entirely subjective – or is there a commonality in the type of, and threshold of, pain people able to endure?
Barring some neurological disorder, I’d assume people feel the same pain, to begin with and respond differently.
If you are “accident prone” or live a high risk/high reward lifestyle, eventually you pick up or develop more effective ways of dealing with pain… tricks, if you will. Alpha wave generation, self-hypnosis. A morphine habit.
Then, depending on your point of view, your pain threshold rises or you become desensitized.
Surely some people feel more or less pain.
They are better or worse at every other sense, like sight and hearing and taste and smell.
I can barely smell perfume any more.
I’m sure the Liddy guy, wasn’t it, could burn himself without pain.
IIRC the body produces natural pain killers (endorphins?) particularly at times of physical stress, presumably to enable you to get out of danger. I have seen footage of troops being loaded onto stretchers with quite severe injuries, happily smoking a ciggie. The pain kicked in later, away from the battlefield. This could explain Uncle John-John’s ability to carry on the game whilst the adrenaline was high.
This is dead-on. When I tore up my knee in high school, I walked off the field- it felt loose, but didn’t particularly hurt at all. Five minutes later, it hurt like hell. Second worst pain I’ve ever had- exceeded only by the post-op pain in the same knee a few weeks later.
Turns out I had completely torn my MCL, and partially torn my ACL.
Apparently I turned really pale & my voice shot up about an octave when the pain hit, according to my teammates. I don’t particularly remember much about it other than thinking “My God, that hurts! Ooooh! This sucks!” over and over.
I think it is desensitizing that makes the difference.
As far as the two examples go the adrenalin rush of a football game makes a lot of difference.Think of all that is happening at a football game to keep your mind off the pain.
Also if you are by yourself you think about the pain a lot more.
One word about John John, a broken toe hurts like hell.Especially if you have to keep walking on it.
Although I can’t provide a site, I read (within the last year) of some studies that show that different people have different sensitivities to pain. What is agonizing to some is only very uncomfortable to others.
I have a very high tolerance to some types of pain and am an absolute wuss with others. For example, I often don’t notice cuts. I will be working on something and not realize I have been cut until I see the blood - or my wife points it out to me. But let me get a toothache or something like that and I am out trying to get morphine or some derivative, right now!!
In Vietnam, I saw many cases where the most severely wounded had the fewest injections of morphine. I believe that is due to the “endorphins” ticker was talking about.
This Ph.D.'s research paper on pain also seems to have some intersting additional information, I thought the section on people who do not experience pain really interesting reading.
Those cases of injured playing in spite of a normally painful injury are not due to dopamines, I don’t think, but to adrenaline, which masks the pain nerve pathway. Dopamine is produced during a pleasureful experience, and that could be the reason that sex also masks pain. Thus, we have the s-m enthusiasts. Another possible explanation for this is that the pain pathway is blocked by a pleasure pathway which overrides it. Perhaps the reason lies in both factors.
As pointed out in one of the links, emotional state has much to do with how we feel the pain sensation. People who are depressed would feel more pain with a similar stimulus than those who are not. There are also, of course, psychosomtic pains, which have no physical impairment as a basis for the pain, but the person actually feels the pain. The mind plays a great part in how we experience pain. I think that’s what we mean when we say different people have different pain thresholds.
There are people who can feel pain in a limb they no longer have. I forget the term for that, but I’m sure some one will post it.
Phantom itch, I think, is what it’s usually called.
As for pain, I’ve got to chime in and say that it’s probably alot to do with conditioning.
I’ve had muscle aches all my life in my hips and calves, I’ve been beaten up, I’ve fallen down stairs, I’ve punched walls, I’ve had badly ingrown toenails… all this has led to my being quite insensitive to pain. You can punch me your hardest and it doesn’t really bother me.
One friend, who was into Tae Kwon Doe, used to demonstrate moves on me (to show other people) because I never asked him to stop, or pulled away from pain, or resisted. He refused to ever do so again after he was showing off an arm-breaking move, and the bone in my arm (humerus) actually flexed, but I didn’t flinch. Freaked him out.
Recently, I’ve been selling plasma, and while the needles and finger-pricks were far from painful, they were never enjoyable, but I notice them much less now than when I first started.
I’ve read somewhere that some people have a condition in where they have a thicker myelin sheathing on their nerves than is normal, as well as having myelin sheathing on nerves that usually don’t. From what I’d heard, people with this condition, while they still feel pain, are much less bothered by it.
While endorphins and neurological makeup have bunches to do with it, I’d bet mental conditioning has just as much.
I don’t think the myelin sheath would have any influence on how we feel. It’s insulating material. Sensations are actually “felt” in the brain, different areas detecting different sensations. Hey, but I could be wrong. Perhaps a neurologist will check in.
I posted prior concerning adrenaline vs. nerve pathways. Upon reflection, I think that it all boils down to chemicals. Although the nerve impulse is transmitted electrically, the neurotransmitters (chemicals) bridge the synapses. I think that these people, like you, who can take more abuse without feeling the same amount of pain as I would, do so because of diminished release of neurotransmitters. There’s a conditioning involve, but not the myelin, the neurotransmitters. That’s my theory. Now let a neurologist chime in to show me where I’m wrong.
Coincidentally I received in today’s mail the latest catalog from the Library of Science http://los.booksonline.com
There’s a new book titled PAIN, The Science of Suffering by Patrick Wolf. So if you’re really interested, you can buy it from them. The synopsis states:
Wolf’s gate control theory teaches that the nervous system modulates and manipulates pain rather than passing it directly to the brain. A neural mechanism, a “gate” in the spinal cord, can open or close to pain signals. This explains why, when you’re distracted from injury, you often don’t feel pain–information is literally being kept from your brain.
Numerous case studies describe individuals experiencing severe trauma but reporting little immediate pain–witness Ronald Reagan’s unawareness, until later, that he’d been shot. Wall summarizes the history of ideas about pain, including Descartes’ early concept of a “pain pathway.” And he profiles what happens in our bodies when we experience various pain-inducing events, from a scratch to an amputation, as well as the phenomenon of “phantom pain.”
*Pain * will allow readers to understand this phenomenon as never before.
check out