This makes no sense, can you explain what you mean?
Pain is “designed” to call attention to the cause of the pain, which is (generally) dangerous to us, and to encourage us to address that cause. But pain can’t “know” that we have responded by, e.g., scheduling a doctor’s appointment. Pain will only “know” that we have addressed the problem when we have actually addressed it, and not merely taken steps to address it (or have someone else address it) at a future date.
In other words, as long as there’s an open wound in your flesh, you’ll feel pain. The pain will be releived when the wound is treated, and eventually heals. It won’t be releived when you notice the problem and start to take steps to seek treatment, because the pain has no way of “knowing” that you have done that, and the wound is still as bad (and as threatening) as it ever was.
I have thought about this quite a bit over the years and here is my view:
I think our brains are wired to seek pleasure signals and avoid pain signals. Pleasure feels good because our brain automatically tries to seek it and pain feels bad because we automatically try and avoid it.
I also think we ALWAYS do what our brain determines will maximise pleasure and minimise pain. So if one choice has a +10 rating for pleasure and another has a -9 rating for pain we will endure the pain but still be highly aware of it so that we might avoid it in the future. Or we might endure a torture of -10 rating because it is preferable to the -11 rating of betraying our loved ones.
The intensity of the pain signal is related to how urgent it is to avoid it. If you accidentally touched a hot stove your hand would normally jump back so quickly that you’d hardly even feel the pain signal. But if you chose to keep your hand there (maybe to get some pleasure from curiosity or avoid the pain of feeling like a wimp) you would become strongly aware that your brain has a pain signal that needs to be avoided as soon as possible.
Pleasure and pain signals can be automatically triggered by your body but can also be associated with memories and people can learn to feel pleasure or pain signals based on learnt things.
Pain is a construct of your brain. That isn’t to say it is always wholly imaginary, referencing nothing, but sometimes that is the case. Here are a couple of videos my doctor recommended when I got hurt a while back:
Thanks for the explanation - I see what Nava meant now.
But I don’t agree. It’s not necessary for our internal “pain processor” to become an independently self-aware conscious entity in order for us to have an arbitrarily sophisticated pain response. There is no reason in principle that our subjective pain level could not be much more complex, responding to internal mental states so that the pain fades dramatically in response in response to (say) an emotional state of “knowing that we have done all that we could possibly do”, even if the physiological state has not yet changed. There’s also no reason, in principle, that we could not evolve active conscious control of our pain level.
I can see good reasons why we did not in practice evolve this way, because “being in less pain” does not necessarily confer a survival advantage. Outside of sexy times, natural selection is not about having fun, it’s about survival.
In fact, we do modify subjective pain levels dramatically when survival is at stake. When “fight or flight” is triggered, we do subjectively forget about pain.
Certainly not necessary, but it could be advantageous…in some circumstances. Deleterious in others. (And, as you noted, it is flexible, such as when someone is at an instant need to react to a threatening stimulus.)
Nature and evolution could not have known about surgery…but a natural form of anesthesia would have been somewhat of an advantage to survival. If such a function had arisen by chance, it might likely have been retained and even refined.
The same is true for quite a few other evolutionary features. For instance, it could be advantageous to be able to hold one’s breath, without the involuntary reflex of gasping once the CO2 levels build too high. How many people have drowned, while almost having swum up to the surface after deep immersion? But evolution built us with that involuntary command, “Breathe, darn ya, breathe!” and we cannot overcome it, no matter what the need.
I’ve noticed over the years that my brain can deal with two simultaneous types of pleasure, but not two simultaneous types of pain. I can listen to music I love while eating food I love; but if I have a headache, then bang my thumb with a hammer, I stop noticing the headache. When I used to get migraines, I often thought of getting rid of the pain by banging my head against the wall.
And what about that intersection of pain and pleasure? In what way is the eating of super-spicy food different than someone who enjoys cutting himself?
Hahahaha thats exactly what im going to say
I don’t understand the OP question – Why are painful and pleasure the opposites?
One hurts, one feels good. Is that an insufficient answer?
A literal explanation – pain and pleasure are two different words with two different meanings.
What subtleties am I missing here?
The OP is asking why the feeling that something has been or is about to be damaged is so extremely uncomfortable, instead of just a very significant tingling or something.
Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence” writes about the specific functions of the brain such at the hippocampus, thalumus and amygdala. How one part of the brain controls signals from the others and how neural pathways are reinforced. A lot is about controlling the emotions that nature bestowed upon us that no longer serve positive uses, but it gives a good insight into a lot of the ways the brain interprets pleasure and pain as well as many other things.
Highly recommended reading for anyone who’s interested in self help with scientific data to back it up. The term, emotional intelligence, is tossed around way too much by people who don’t really understand what it is.
Because the creatures that could ignore pain or only felt minor pain generally were less like to live long enough to reach reproductive age compared to the ones who felt debilitating pain.
A splinter could kill you before modern medicine.
We have that though, people can suppress pain in life or death situations. Only when the threat is passed do people feel pain.
Congenital Analgesia…not being able to feel pain, is a very very bad thing.
Arguably sociopathy and antisocial personality disorder are the same thing for emotional pain. Sociopaths do not really feel emotional pain (anxiety, guilt, shame, fear, remorse, etc). The end result is that many of them end up alienating themselves from and being targeted for revenge by society.
That would only be true if the creature could identify the cause of the debilitating pain and actually do something to remedy the situation, before it killed him. Usually not the case.
Yes but a fear of pain will cause the organism to avoid dangerous situations in the first place. It will also cause it to work harder to escape when it finds itself in danger.
I forget the math, but I was reading a book on evolution that basically said if trait X only provides a 1% survival advantage, after Y generations there will be a 99.9% prevalence of the trait.
The advantage of intense pain in both avoiding trauma and escaping it once it is near is likely much higher than 1%. The fact that sometimes an appendix will burst, a tooth will get infected or a person will get giardia and they will suffer immensely while being able to do nothing about it is just a sad tradeoff that evolution didn’t care about.
Either it’s just you, or there’s some truth to women being better at multitasking because plenty of us have headaches (including migraines) and horrible cramps at the same time, both of which consciously hurt.