To me this is interesting evidence suggesting that one purpose of pain in humans is to be visible (attracting help). It doesn’t go very far to suggest that this is pain’s only purpose, which I think is what would be needed for me to hypothesize that solitary animals feel little or no pain.
I’m currently in school for physical therapy assisting; as you might imagine, pain is a big topic for us! The standard hypothesis we’ve been taught is that pain is most typically experienced as a signal to the person experiencing it that something needs to be done. (This is the model where the pain you feel on burning your hand is what causes you to take it off the hot stove—or more accurately, what causes you not to put your hand right back on the stove, because you’ve probably had a reflex reaction that removed your hand from the hot stove before the signal reached your conscious awareness.) It’s easy to see how in humans “something needs to be done” can include a much broader range of behaviors than simply moving away from something unpleasant, avoiding immediate weight-bearing on a sprained ankle, etc. But the pain is already useful even if the reaction to it is smaller. If you’ve sprained your ankle, it’s a good idea to be a bit more sedentary than usual the next day even if you never cry and try hard not to limp. It seems to me like a lot of animals that we think of as showing less pain may show it in subtle behavioral ways that would not be noticeable to their typical predators. (These may also be harder to observe in situations that don’t allow for normal behavior, such as a laboratory.)
But you’re right that pain is very complicated, and it doesn’t always correspond to tissue damage, especially in the case of chronic pain. It may be that some situations in which humans feel pain have evolved specifically in tandem with our complex social behavior. I would just be very wary of extending that to acute pain in general, which does seem to be strongly associated with tissue damage in humans in a broad variety of cases—and for which there is often a direct physical response the pain seems adapted to provoke.
To me this is interesting evidence suggesting that one purpose of pain in humans is to be visible (attracting help). It doesn’t go very far to suggest that this is pain’s only purpose, which I think is what would be needed for me to hypothesize that solitary animals feel little or no pain.
I’m currently in school for physical therapy assisting; as you might imagine, pain is a big topic for us! The standard hypothesis we’ve been taught is that pain is most typically experienced as a signal to the person experiencing it that something needs to be done. (This is the model where the pain you feel on burning your hand is what causes you to take it off the hot stove—or more accurately, what causes you not to put your hand right back on the stove, because you’ve probably had a reflex reaction that removed your hand from the hot stove before the signal reached your conscious awareness.) It’s easy to see how in humans “something needs to be done” can include a much broader range of behaviors than simply moving away from something unpleasant, avoiding immediate weight-bearing on a sprained ankle, etc. But the pain is already useful even if the reaction to it is smaller. If you’ve sprained your ankle, it’s a good idea to be a bit more sedentary than usual the next day even if you never cry and try hard not to limp. It seems to me like a lot of animals that we think of as showing less pain may show it in subtle behavioral ways that would not be noticeable to their typical predators. (These may also be harder to observe in situations that don’t allow for normal behavior, such as a laboratory.)
But you’re right that pain is very complicated, and it doesn’t always correspond to tissue damage, especially in the case of chronic pain. It may be that some situations in which humans feel pain have evolved specifically in tandem with our complex social behavior. I would just be very wary of extending that to acute pain in general, which does seem to be strongly associated with tissue damage in humans in a broad variety of cases—and for which there is often a direct physical response the pain seems adapted to provoke.