Why can’t we control our urges to scream/squeak or hold our breath when in intense pain, no matter how hard we try? (If we try everything we can to hold back our screams, there’d still be groaning sounds.)
In: Biology
Sorry, who is we? Perhaps, if there is a higher chance of survival or at least less harm, if one does not scream, then it is possible to have extreme levels of self control and not betray your pain? The mind has defense mechanisms such as disassociation, when someone is enduring something beyond what the human mind or body should be able to reasonably handle, you go elsewhere and disconnect from the pain. I was personally tortured for 13 hours and felt pain only after I was rescued and at the hospital. Many military members are trained how to survive torture without breaking and giving in, should they become a prisoner of an enemy seeking information.
Because for a long time, there was no benefit to holding in your scream. Language is relatively new. Humans, in some form or another, lived for millions of years before we developed comprehensive languages that could accurately communicate what we experience. More simply put, we were around for a long time with no way of telling other people what we were experiencing. So if you were in pain, you want to make sure that’s communicated. That’s quite literally a life or death scenario. So we scream really loud when something hurts. The worse it hurts, the more we scream. That’s all we could do for millions of years, and that instinct is still in us.
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