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Asked by stoneswh to Sarah, rhysphillips, Ian, Helen, David on 23 Jun 2011.
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Rhys Phillips answered on 14 Jun 2011:
Hmm, I’m not a biologist so I can’t go into detail but basically it’s a signal sent to your brain from your nerves. I suspect it is something we have developed through evolution as a method of warning of danger.
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David Corne answered on 14 Jun 2011:
Pain is a danger signal – if we feel it, and if we know where it’s coming from (this is usually true), then we immediately know we have something important to sort out or we might be damaged beyond repair. So, the pain signal forces us to act quickly, hence immediately pushing an elephant off your foot, or removing a thorn, or wrapping something tightly around your arm to stop the flow of blood, or going to the dentist. Newborn babies’ wailing causes a similarly urgent response, for similar reasons. But you might be asking a much bigger and more difficult question – where does the actual feeling come from? Scientists just don’t understand that at the moment. For example, we could build a sophisticated robot, and program it to have urgent response routines to signals that come from damage, or overstretching its joints, etc. And, the robot would do what we expect – if it got damaged, it would immediately respond and try to limit or repair the damage. But would it *feel* anything? If you want to study this question, do biology and computing, and also a bit of philosophy, and then you;ll be ready to search for an answer. Or, quite possibly, you will find yourself rephrasing the question — most of the time when we haven’t made progress on difficult questions like this, it’s because there’s something wrong with the question.
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Ian van der Linde answered on 14 Jun 2011:
There is physical pain, the kind we get when we shut our fingers in a door, and psychological pain, the type we feel when somebody unpleasant happens to us or somebody we love, or somebody says or does something mean to us. Physical pain is there as a defence mechanism to stop us from injuring our bodies — some people are born who cannot feel any pain, and they repeatedly break bones and injure themselves because the “feedback” of pain isn’t there to make them stop doing the thing that is damaging their body. Psychological pain is a tougher one. It makes us try to avoid situations that might be upsetting for us. It also helps groups bond together, so that when you are upset somebody will comfort you, and when somebody else is upset you will comfort them.
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Helen Fletcher answered on 23 Jun 2011:
We feel pain to make us stop what we are doing and sort out whatever the problem is. Nociceptors in your body are responsible for generating an electrical signal is response to noxious stimuli. The are groups of nociceptors that respond to heat, mechanical (cuts) or chemical pain but in each case the electrical signal travels to your brain and you think ouch, I’d better take my hand out of this fire, or my foot off this spike. Sometimes however people can get a phantom pain, say if they have had a foot amputated they feel pain where the foot used to be but obviously there is no foot there to cause them any pain, the brain still perceives that there is a foot there.
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