from neurological point of view, why self inflicted pain hurts less or doesn’t hurt at all?
In: Biology
I think you mean like then you tickle yourself and it dosnt feel the same as when someone else tickles you.
There is a psychological component to that, theres an experiment when they cover your hand and put a mirror between both hands, and you look and the hand in the mirror looks like your other hand, so it feels weird. theres a smiliar experiment when they put a rubber hand where your real hand should go, and when done correctly you can actually feel it when someone tickles or stabs it.
you have to understand that when you cut your hand its not your hand thats hurting, its your brain telling you your hand is hurting, i know it sounds weird since you feel the pain in your hand but you´re basically a brain in a jar with the nerves connecting you to sensors like eyes, ears, skin, nose…
and it depends on how your brain interprets the pain. theres a condition called Cipa where your pain receptors dont work correctly or your brain fails to interpret pain, its very complex when you cant even notice small cuts or when your eyes get dry…
Pain feels bad so people don’t want to hurt themselves usually. So when they do they don’t hurt themselves as much. Plus knowing and preparing for pain can help modulate how much it affects you
Probably something to do with attention distribution. We have a finite amount of attention we can pay towards things (our working memory, think like computer RAM).
If you are focusing on a task (e.g. popping a pimple, pulling out an ingrown hair etc.) then your attention is mostly distributed towards making sure you do it right, rather than focusing on the pain – which makes it feel worse.
This is a tactic Navy Seals etc. use in torture training, or people who take ice baths, they perform a complex mental task like counting backwards from 300 in sets of 3 (300, 297, 294 etc.) so their attention is taken away from the pain and towards their mental task.
Also if you can mentally prepare you can incur an adrenaline dump which numbs pain
Pain is an emotional processed layering of the stimuli of nociceptive nerve endings. Your nerve feels a strong touch and sends the signal to your brain, which then decides how you’re going to feel about it. That’s why opiates work–they don’t really dull pain, they just make you not care about it. In the same way being slapped in a certain context might feel good or painful depending on how your brain decided to present the information to you.
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