ELI5- Do things hurt even when they don’t seem to? For example, if I hit myself but it doesn’t necessarily hurt, does my body still register it as painful? Do people with a high pain tolerance still register the pain but just don’t feel it?
In: Biology
Pain is just your body’s way of saying “stop! You’re damaging yourself.” If you don’t feel pain, it’s because those signals aren’t firing. So in that sense, no, the pain doesn’t exist
In terms of low pain tolerance, it depends. Some people are accustomed to pain so they can tolerate more of it, like tolerances to anything else. So they still feel it, it just doesn’t disturb them as much
Having the inability to feel pain, though (which is a real thing) is an incredibly dangerous condition. For example, imagine you set your hand on the stove without thinking and didn’t feel pain. You wouldn’t know until you’d damaged the heck out of your hand, probably permanently
If there’s no pain, there’s 2 reasons why. Your body either isn’t being harmed enough (or has become too harmed) for the nerves to go “Hey! Stop that!”, or something is stopping your brain from recieving those signals (medication, disease etc).
An example is digestion. Digestion is exruciatingly painful, but our brain is just ignoring it, since that is what it’s meant to feel like (plus if you were writing in agony 20000 ago because you could feel your stomach digest, you’d be eaten by whatever lion finds you first).
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