Why can’t we control our urges to scream when in pain?

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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

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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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