I went through these experiences voluntarily and with the knowledge that I have the freedom to stop whenever I want. People suffering from painful disease, children dying of hunger, chickens being electrocuted to death, fish being asphyxiated to death—for these individuals, such experiences are a horrific reality, not an experiment
I think this is a very important distinction that should be given more emphasis. When I’ve experienced severe pain, the no.1 thought in my mind was “oh god make it stop”. This makes complete sense if you think of pain as your body’s way of saying, “ok, whatever it is you’re doing, you need to stop doing it now.” And I think a lot of the psychological suffering I experienced was due to the stress of not being able to stop the thing that was causing pain, and not knowing how long the pain would go on for. I add the word ‘psychological’ for clarity here, but in reality I don’t think there’s a clear difference between ‘psychological’ and ‘physical’ sources of pain. All pain in a sense is psychological—all of it happens ‘in your mind’, and factors such as knowing the pain will end soon can have a big effect on the experience of pain.
This distinction could also have a big effect on how people rate their pain on the pain-track framework. The framework seems to define pain a lot in terms of ‘how long could a person endure this?’ And that answer probably varies a lot depending on whether you know the pain will go away soon, or not. For ‘disabling’ pain, it could literally be less disabling, if you knows it’s going to end soon. You might think something like, “ok, I know this will end in 5 minutes, for now I’m going to do this other job to distract myself”. And looking back at the experience, and your behaviour at the time, you might read the scale, and think “ok it’s wasn’t that disabling, I could still do stuff”.
I have the complete opposite intuition: equal levels of pain are harder to endure for equal time if you have the option to make them stop. Obviously I don’t disagree that pain for a long time is worse than pain for a short time.
This intuition is driven by experiences like: the same level of exercise fatigue is a lot easier to endure if giving up would cause me to lose face. In general, exercise fatigue is more distracting than pain from injuries (my reference points being a broken finger and a cup of boiling water in my crotch—the latter being about as distractingly painful as a whole bunch of not especially notable bike races etc).
Thinking a bit more: the boiling water actually was more intense for a few seconds, but after that it was comparable to bike racing. But also, all I wanted to do was run around shouting obscenities and given that I was doing exactly that I don’t recall the sense of being in conflict with myself, which is one of the things I find hard to deal with about pain.
I don’t know that this scales to very intense pain. The only pain experience I’ve had notable enough to recall years later was e when I ran 70km without having done very much running to train for it—it hurt a lot I don’t have any involuntary pain experiences that compare to it (running + lack of preparation was important here—I’ve done 400km bike rides with no especially notable pain). This was voluntary in the sense that I could have stopped and called someone to pick me up, but that would have disqualified my team.
One prediction I’d make is that holding my hand in an ice bucket with only myself for company would be much harder than doing it with other people where I’d be ashamed to be the first to pull it out. I don’t just mean I’d act differently—I mean I think I would actually experience substantially less psychological tension.
Your comment made me realise I’m actually talking about two different things:
When you can choose to end the pain at any point e.g. exercise, the hand-in-cold-water experiment.
When you can’t choose to end the pain, but you know that it will end soon with some degree of certainty. e.g. “medics will be here with morphine in 10 minutes”, or “we can see the head, the baby’s almost out”.
I agree with you that having some kind of peer pressure or social credit for ‘doing well’ can help a person withstand pain. I’d imagine this has an effect on the hand-in-cold-water experiment, if you’re doing it on your own vs as part of a trial with onlookers.
I think this is a very important distinction that should be given more emphasis. When I’ve experienced severe pain, the no.1 thought in my mind was “oh god make it stop”. This makes complete sense if you think of pain as your body’s way of saying, “ok, whatever it is you’re doing, you need to stop doing it now.” And I think a lot of the psychological suffering I experienced was due to the stress of not being able to stop the thing that was causing pain, and not knowing how long the pain would go on for. I add the word ‘psychological’ for clarity here, but in reality I don’t think there’s a clear difference between ‘psychological’ and ‘physical’ sources of pain. All pain in a sense is psychological—all of it happens ‘in your mind’, and factors such as knowing the pain will end soon can have a big effect on the experience of pain.
This distinction could also have a big effect on how people rate their pain on the pain-track framework. The framework seems to define pain a lot in terms of ‘how long could a person endure this?’ And that answer probably varies a lot depending on whether you know the pain will go away soon, or not. For ‘disabling’ pain, it could literally be less disabling, if you knows it’s going to end soon. You might think something like, “ok, I know this will end in 5 minutes, for now I’m going to do this other job to distract myself”. And looking back at the experience, and your behaviour at the time, you might read the scale, and think “ok it’s wasn’t that disabling, I could still do stuff”.
I have the complete opposite intuition: equal levels of pain are harder to endure for equal time if you have the option to make them stop. Obviously I don’t disagree that pain for a long time is worse than pain for a short time.
This intuition is driven by experiences like: the same level of exercise fatigue is a lot easier to endure if giving up would cause me to lose face. In general, exercise fatigue is more distracting than pain from injuries (my reference points being a broken finger and a cup of boiling water in my crotch—the latter being about as distractingly painful as a whole bunch of not especially notable bike races etc).
Thinking a bit more: the boiling water actually was more intense for a few seconds, but after that it was comparable to bike racing. But also, all I wanted to do was run around shouting obscenities and given that I was doing exactly that I don’t recall the sense of being in conflict with myself, which is one of the things I find hard to deal with about pain.
I don’t know that this scales to very intense pain. The only pain experience I’ve had notable enough to recall years later was e when I ran 70km without having done very much running to train for it—it hurt a lot I don’t have any involuntary pain experiences that compare to it (running + lack of preparation was important here—I’ve done 400km bike rides with no especially notable pain). This was voluntary in the sense that I could have stopped and called someone to pick me up, but that would have disqualified my team.
One prediction I’d make is that holding my hand in an ice bucket with only myself for company would be much harder than doing it with other people where I’d be ashamed to be the first to pull it out. I don’t just mean I’d act differently—I mean I think I would actually experience substantially less psychological tension.
Your comment made me realise I’m actually talking about two different things:
When you can choose to end the pain at any point e.g. exercise, the hand-in-cold-water experiment.
When you can’t choose to end the pain, but you know that it will end soon with some degree of certainty. e.g. “medics will be here with morphine in 10 minutes”, or “we can see the head, the baby’s almost out”.
I agree with you that having some kind of peer pressure or social credit for ‘doing well’ can help a person withstand pain. I’d imagine this has an effect on the hand-in-cold-water experiment, if you’re doing it on your own vs as part of a trial with onlookers.