I’m not interested in the evolutionary reason, I know we need pain to tell us something bad is happening to the body, but why can’t we decide to turn off the pain signals once we know it’s happened?
I’m not interested in the evolutionary reason, I know we need pain to tell us something bad is happening to the body, but why can’t we decide to turn off the pain signals once we know it’s happened?
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Then we might not attend to the urgent physical threat that damage to our body or illness may be causing. We might forget or ignore it.
When you’re talking about evolution, there’s no firm “why.”
Could be that we just… never developed that ability. Could be that we did, but that it was detrimental.
My suspicion–and this is speculation–would be the second one, that there’s an evolutionary pressure keeping us in a place where we can ignore some degree of pain but not actually turn it off. Pain is there to let us know that we’re injured or doing something that will injure us and to incentivize us to stop doing things that don’t help solve that issue. We already have something of a failsafe in the form of an adrenaline response that lets us completely ignore pain when we really need to.
Being able to turn the sensation of pain off would likely just lead to us doing so and then permanently fucking our ability to walk after running around on a sprained ankle or twisted knee.
It will really start to tickle when you get to the question “is there anything we can actually tell our brain to do?”
To do this we’d need to have evolved the ability. For it to evolve it would need to be the result of random mutation and then be selected for because it’s advantageous. So either the mutation just never occurred, or it occurred but wasn’t selected for. Sometimes people are born without any sense of pain and these people often get badly injured because they don’t notice when something hurts. Pain is pretty useful, and turning if off could be a big issue.
It’s an essential sensation that our body requires to get us away from things that do us harm.
The body needs to be always ready to perceive pain so that when it’s there we can instantly react.
It’s probably an unsatisfying answer but being able to selectively turn off pain signals probably just wasn’t necessary or beneficial for our survival.
But that is the reason. You can’t ask “why can’t we turn it off” and then say you’re not interested in evolutionary reasons. The “neurological” reason we can’t turn it off is that the ability to turn it off would be an evolutionary disadvantage and thus has phased out of the gene pool. If it ever existed at all.
Your neurons are physical. You can’t turn them off any more than you can turn off your foot or make your digested food rise back up your colon.
A “convenient to have” or cool ability isn’t just added into our body’s evolution just because you thought of it. The capabilities of our bodies are based on mutations that didn’t make it more likely that we die and the one you posit wasn’t one of those
Don’t forget that pain can change as well. Say your arm is pinned beneath a rock. As you move to free it, different parts of your arm could hurt. That’s useful information you wouldn’t get if you turned the pain off.
For the same reason a light bulb can’t turn itself off. To grossly oversimplify the brain is to think of it as a series of wires and connections. There is no integrated switch that can be manually operated to just shut off pain.
Evolution. If humans had the ability to turn off pain then we’d do it 100% of the time, which means we would stop noticing and attending to life threatening injuries.
Evolution doesn’t produce optimal solution but operates on a “good enough” basis.
There are certainly situations where selectively turning off pain would be an advantage (e.g. running away even if very hurt, medical procedures before anaesthetics, etc). However, that would require a very complex regulation, as well as high cognitive abilities, to correctly decide when pain is beneficial and when it’s harmful. The latter wasn’t really given for nearly all animals (I would contend even humans would have trouble using that power responsibly).
Instead, you get some pain resistance when under stress hormones like adrenalin, which is a reasonably simple system that is good enough in nearly all situations.
You kind of can.
The best way to treat chronic pain is with psychological intervention. You can teach people how to live in a way that their brains tell them about their pain less.
If you have a toothache and you play a video game you enjoy – the pain will lessen, even disappear.
Distraction is how to do it basically.
It’s something that is controlled by the automatic part of your body. Like you can’t just ask your heart to stop beating.
Interestingly you CAN control your breathing manually like how you’re doing it right now until after some point that your conscious mind will just forget it and you’re back to breathing automatically again.
In Dune, the Bene Gesserit reached the peak of their abilities where they can control every part of their body consciously and do things that looks magical.
There’s a lot of things you can’t make your brain do. You can’t tickle yourself for example. You can’t can’t mentally force an orgasm without physical component. I can’t force myself to have the hiccups. Why? There’s just no pathway for it. Simple as that. We don’t have full mastery over our brain it’s a very sophisticated machine with LOTS of components.
There are two kinds of pain signal. The first is acute pain, this occurs very quickly after an injury and doesn’t last long. It’s there to stop us from doing the thing which caused the injury.
Then there is a delayed pain response. This takes several seconds or even minutes instead of a few milliseconds to reach the brain, but then lasts longer. This is to encourage us to rest the injured part.
Both types are processed by the subconscious, instinctive part of the brain not the conscious part. Likely because species without these responses did not survive.
In evolution early animals/humans that didn’t feel pain would’ve died quicker for not nursing injuries or avoiding danger… the ones with typical neurological signals survived more and passed those genetic forward.