Why can’t we control out own sensations ? Why is our brain not able to just turn off the feeling of pain for the moment ? “I got it, something is bad, now stop hurting !” Or to just fall asleep whenever we want to.
In: Biology
This is what you see happen in people with leprosy. The disease doesn’t cause anyone’s limbs to rot off, but it does deaden touch and pain receptors, so people continually get injured because they can’t sense it happening. Pain is good for us, generally speaking.
I might add that the nervous system is complex, and some nerves send signals one way, some another, and we dont have a map. If our nerves are an extension of our brain, that would be like turning portions of our brain off… not ideal, as we are pretty much our brain. That is where consciousness seems to be.
Also, nerves to get damaged, or die, and we lose function either temporarily or permanently as a result. So turning any of our nervous system off will start rendering our human, corporeal form, less that efficient.
It would be cool to throw a switch and not feel pain, but nerves are the things that throw our switches; nerves tell our body how to move. Mechanically, it would be impossible for a switch to turn itself off, and then back on, without another outside force working on it. Nerves are our outside force, the way we interact with what lies outside us. This is why it seems functionally impossible.
There’s nothing in an absolute sense preventing those things from existing, but they have to happen through the evolutionary process. The pain mechanism and response system evolved in this way, and it has huge evolutionary advantages. Bluntly, most of the time, or at least enough of the time to favor reproductive success, having a persistent pain signal that can’t be turned off leads to more offspring. The exact reasons why this is the case aren’t all that critical, but it’s probably something along the lines of if you learn to avoid things that cause pain, you’ll do less damage to your body, and likely survive to be able to reproduce. At least more often than those without any sort of pain and response mechanism. So now to be able to turn off the pain signals, the body would need to develop and pass along some way to do that. It would have to be something genetically coded in, and it would have to confer a survival advantage resulting in more offspring compared to not having that ability. It’s not enough that we’d want that ability, it would have to impact our ability to pass on genes. Same with being able to sleep or not sleep as desired, or just about any physical or behavioral trait for that matter.
/edited for typos
In short, we don’t know. It’s a very interesting area because some people do have the ability to shut off pain or fall asleep at will, while others need someone to tell them that they can do it before they are able to while others can never ignore pain or fall asleep without drugs.
There is research being done to try and figure out why this might be and to discover how much of the experience of pain is for surviving in the moment, learning to survive something similar in the future, and social to tell others that you need help.
Sleep is even more mysterious. There still isn’t a clear idea of what sleep is and why it is necessary. We do know that not being able to sleep is often dangerous but again some people do not sleep at all and seem to be fine.
There is a lot we don’t know about our own bodies, mostly because they are very complicated things.
It is a defense mechanism… Lets say you’re hiking and have a dislocated ankle or knee. The pain is there to remind you there is something fucked up, and not to abuse it or it can get worse… That is basically why is pain, to remind you there is something wrong and you need to treat it ASAP. Removing may trigger you to think its not that bad
Because of evolution. Evolution will only select for mutations that benefit our chance of survival. The ability to consciously turn off a sensation is not only a very difficult mutation to evolve (in that the chance of all the right mutations happening is very very low), it’s also one that’s not beneficial and, in many circumstances, even actively detrimental.
The main purpose of pain isn’t just to report “something bad”, it’s to make you avoid the same thing in the future. If you could turn off pain the moment you feel it, that avoidance mechanism has been removed. You won’t learn not to touch the nettle again, because you know you can just turn the pain off again if you do – ie the “stick” used to prevent you doing stupid things has lost the vast majority of its impact.
Pain is, broadly speaking, a healthy response in that your nervous system is working properly.
Having said that, there are dissociative conditions where a person cuts themself off from the situation they’re in, thus allowing them to survive the kind of pain they’re going through. It’s pretty terrible tbh, I wouldn’t want that ability even though I have some painful experiences regularly.
Usually this type of thing happens to people who experience traumatic events: rape, child abuse, torture, etc. The person just sort of leaves their body while the trauma occurs.
So while it may seem like being able to shut off pain sounds like a good thing, it’s typically anything but.
Your brain can shut this stuff off when it gets bad enough. Your brain can cause you to disassociate from a very traumatic event so you don’t recall it or panic during it.
Also adrenaline and opiates created by the brain can mask pain for a short period of time.
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Because “you” don’t exist. Your consciousness is something your brain makes up after the fact to explain things.
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