People who cannot feel pain

[jonathan.bluestein]

I first encountered this phenomenon with an ex-girlfriend, who couldn't physically feel shit (this sucks big time, believe me). Still, she had some sensitivity to pain. Today in the park I met another dude who had this rare condition, but to a much more extreme a degree. He has never trained in martial arts, and we got talking and experimenting through his interest in my practice. Symptoms:

- Cannot be tickled.

- Very high pain threshold - anywhere on the body (I admit I didn't check his balls, lol).

- Cannot be conventionally joint-locked, unless the joint is twisted to a degree that would make another man faint from the pain. That includes even the fingers. Neck had to be nearly broken to get a reaction, and even then it just forced him to move and didn't really hurt him. He didn't even react to almost crushing his windpipe.

- Was not susceptible to any pressure point (tried at least 10 of them, with considerable force).

- Was not aware of this special ability/condition being out of the ordinary.

I happened to have another martial artist beside me, versed in some Krav Maga, when I met that guy. The Krav Maga dude couldn't do anything to that no-pain guy either. We tried lots of stuff. His ears could not be pulled - unless you wish to tear them off. I was given permission to punch him as hard as I could in the belly and torso. He only began to feel something at about 70% power, at which point I didn't go further, realizing that I could actually cause some internal damage without him realizing it (I also didn't hit in the ribs, fearing to break them). Very light shots to general brain-stem area did produce a normal momentary blackout reaction as in normal people, though it didn't bother the guy at all. Eyes reacted rather normally. His arms and legs could tolerate practically any strike. Most things I tried on him, I also tried on the Krav Maga dude, and the normal dude really suffered serious punishment from the exact same techniques and had tapped or withdrawn instantly. The no-pain guy told us that he is has occasionally fought other people (though rather quiet, polite and well-mannered overall), and it always seemed to him that people cannot really hit him hard

Needless to say, myself and the Krav Maga dude were shocked at this. That guy could take an endless amount of punishment, and had he been a martial artist, this could've been a huge advantage. We did however also figure that this condition also put him in great danger of being injured without him knowing it. His limbs for instance could eventually be broken, but he would certainly not know when to tap! I almost broke the guy's neck and he didn't notice. That was quite insane...
I must admit it is quite incredible and psychologically overwhelming, after years of feeling and thinking your shit works (and testing it on others), to meet a person who just by genetic chance is immune to a large extent of your martial arsenal. It's a bizarre and surreal sight to behold.

I did not strike him to the head... I wonder what would have happened, and how this condition might have influenced the possibility of him being knocked out. This is, of course, beyond safe measures. The guy testified that when people had struck him to the face in fights before, it did not bother him much, though he became somewhat bothered when his face started to swell. The Krav Maga guy asked him whether he felt anything in cases of severe skin scratches, as in when falling on concrete while wearing shorts. The no-pain guy replied that he only felt something a while later, but not immediately following such events.

Have you ever encountered someone like this? Does anyone know the name for this condition?

[NoSword]

Does Pain Always Hurt?
Posted on June 11, 2012 by Todd Hargrove • 9 Comments
If you want to understand how a complex system works, and you don’t have the design specs or the user’s manual, one way to get some insight is to engage in reverse engineering. This often involves breaking one part of the system and then seeing what happens. If you want to apply this technique to understanding the pain system, you can’t really just go and break people, but you can find people who are already broken and try to find out why.

That is why pain scientists are interested in the rare cases where the system appears to have gone totally haywire, such as congenital insensitivity to pain, allodynia, or phantom limb pain. These cases are a rich source of insight.

I recently read about a very bizarre example of pain system brokeness called pain asymbolia. I’m not sure what the takeaway is, but it is definitely thought provoking.

Pain asymbolia patients can feel pain and describe its quality and intensity. But they don’t consider it unpleasant, or feel very motivated to do anything about it! How can pain not be unpleasant? That sounds like a contradiction in terms. Like watching a Twilight movie, but it doesn’t suck. How can pain not hurt?

Feeling pain and being in pain

To understand pain asymbolia, it is useful to contrast it with congenital pain insensitivity. People with this condition were born without functioning nociceptors, and therefore do not receive any warning signals from their bodies at all. Their other sensory signaling is intact, so they can feel a knife cutting through their leg. They just don’t feel any associated pain. So in order to protect themselves from harm, they have to memorize the sensations that occur with tissue damage, and then take immediate action when they sense them. In other words, they have to create their own pain alarm system from scratch.

Pain asymbolia patients have functioning nociceptors, and can therefore experience pain in vivid detail. They can describe the location, intensity and character of a painful stimulus, whether it is strong or weak, burning, stinging, stabbing, etc. They just don’t consider the pain unpleasant and they are not motivated to avoid it. In fact, they may giggle or smile as the stimulus is being applied.

So it appears that pain is like a dish composed of separate ingredients. In pain asymbolia patients, for some reason the “ouchness” is missing. Like a cake that has no sugar, the whole point of the experience is lost. The technical explanation for this omission is that the “sensory-discriminative” dimension of pain is intact, while the “motivational-affective” dimension is missing. Apparently this dimension is provided by the insula and the parietal operculum, because pain asymbolic patients have almost invariably sustained brain damage in these areas.

What about the reverse problem – can we have the motivational-affective part of pain without the sensory- discriminative part? The sugar without the cake? In his book Feeling Pain and Being in Pain, Nicola Grahek discusses some examples that seem to qualify, such as one patient who could not locate or describe the character or intensity of pain caused by a precise laser to his hand. All he knew was that there was some vague undefined badness between his shoulder and hand that he wanted to avoid.

So what?

So is any of this knowledge relevant to people without brain damage? I think its useful to know that the unpleasantness of pain can be separate from its character or intensity. My personal experience is that the intensity of pain is in not identical to its unpleasantness. Of course there is a correlation, but there is often an observable disconnect.

For example, I find that I can tolerate a good degree of pain in my knee or foot without getting distracted, but even a slight disturbance in my neck or upper back drives me nuts, and gets all of my attention until the problem is solved. I recall one time when I had some sort of (thankfully temporary) illness that for some reason caused a huge amount of nervy pain to wander around all over my back for a few days. Although it certainly wasn’t any fun, there was definitely something about it that didn’t bother me as much as it should have. And it had a peculiar character as well, I almost felt that it didn’t belong to me, as if there was pain in the air and I just walked into it. Sometimes I would tell my wife: “Wow this really fucking hurts!”, in a voice that sounded more impressed than aggrieved. Of course I did a lot of whining as well.

My clients seem to have quite different attitudes towards pain. Some can go for years with nonstop serious pain and they don’t really seem very bothered by it or motivated to cure it. Dealing with pain is a just low priority in their life. The motivational aspect of pain isn’t as strong for them. Others will go to great lengths to deal with seemingly minor annoyances, such as tightness, asymmetry or just a vague sense of wrongness in certain areas.

I have noticed that some of my clients who suffer the most pain also seem to have the highest pain tolerance. I recall one client who hurt all over. I pressed at one point and said “I’m sorry does that hurt?” She was proud of being tough and said “you can’t hurt me.” I said “no you are incredibly easy to hurt. You just don’t care that much when you do.”

I wouldn’t call her a pain asymbolic, but perhaps we are all on a spectrum, where some of us have brains that tend to add less unpleasantness to the pain recipe than others. Perhaps learning to cope with pain involves developing some ability to modify the recipe.

What do you think? Have any good pain stories? Share in the comments.

http://www.bettermovement.org/2012/when ... esnt-hurt/

[vadaga]

great scott! It sounds like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer becomes a professional boxer...

[jonathan.bluestein]

Thanks for the info NoSword. Very interesting. Still not sure which of the two conditions described the guy I met had. He seemed to be able to sense something, but it surely didn't bother him at all.

[jonathan.bluestein]

...

[kenneth fish]

There are records of numerous "iron men" in boxing (for example, Leon Spinks) who could take enormous punishment and not really be aware of the pain - some would feel something later, but really did not experience pain to a significant degree.

[jonathan.bluestein]

Could it be Wang Shujin have had this condition?

In Robert Smith's latest book he wrote that one day, after being allowed to kick Wang with all his might, he then later at night passed by Wang's house by coincidence. It was dark, but from the outside he swore he heard the most pain-agonizing shouts and moans he had ever heard in his life. Contrary to this anecdotal description however, it'd seem that most people who tried couldn't really hurt Wang, at least when punching his belly...

[bailewen]

This just goes to show, there are disadvantages to joint locks that rely on pain. One of the advantages to Aikido, when it's done well, is that it does not depend on pain. It's more like Taiji in that you are supposed to blend perfectly with the incoming force and redirect it. When done well, there is nothing to fight against. You just lose your balance and get led around. "pain" never figures into the equation.

I had never thought of a person who just doens't feel pain but the example of someone who is drunk, high (on certain things) or even psychotic has been always been a common one, IME.

[taiwandeutscher]

Fighting someone on PCB...a nightmare!

[Dmitri]

To paraphrase Will Smith's character from the upcoming movie trailer, "Damage -- is very real. Pain -- is a choice." (Maybe a bit extreme, but definitely true to some degree.)

P.S. One of the best thing I got out of GJJ are the importance and effectiveness of blood chokes.

[jonathan.bluestein]

This just goes to show, there are disadvantages to joint locks that rely on pain. One of the advantages to Aikido, when it's done well, is that it does not depend on pain. It's more like Taiji in that you are supposed to blend perfectly with the incoming force and redirect it. When done well, there is nothing to fight against. You just lose your balance and get led around. "pain" never figures into the equation.

I had never thought of a person who just doens't feel pain but the example of someone who is drunk, high (on certain things) or even psychotic has been always been a common one, IME.

I would have liked to see a good Aikidoka try a person who has that condition. From this experience I have learned that there are many more techniques which rely on pain than we normally realize. Yes, taking down this kind of person, when he had no MA experience, wasn't a problem. However, he'd just get up again. He could probably continue to fight with messed up tendons, or even broken fingers. He told us he once broke one of his toes by slamming in into furniture. I hypothesize that most people reflexively bend their toes a little when being accidently like that, cause of the pain; or most people just have a learned reaction of not going all the way when hitting something with their toes. But that guy didn't have this sort of mechanism, and neither have this accident stopped him from walking right afterwards. One would probably have to break something in his legs, knock him out or kill him, for him to stop. Otherwise, it's possible to exhaust such a person if you're in better shape... Or so I hope

[RickMatz]

One of my daughters had a classmate in high school who had this condition. He was a cross country runner and the coaches had to watch him closely so that he simply didn’t run until he dropped dead.

When I was an aikido student, one of my seniors worked in a mental hospital transporting patients. She had to deal with some violent people who were so nuts that they had a higher pain threshold than many of us could imagine, or people so whacked out on drugs that again, pain didn’t register very well.

In a nutshell, her advice based on the experience was not to rely on pain. She thought that gaining a mechanical advantage, or attacking the respiratory system was a better bet.

[I am...]

My 2 cents.

I train from a standpoint where pain resistance in the opponent is something that should be assumed. Pain compliance has never been something I have been a fan of since so many variables can affect it (adrenaline, drugs, physical makeup, defiance, etc.). Better to bypass worrying about causing pain altogether and train to affect the opponent structurally, as well work against things like sight, blood flow, respiration, and balance.

Knocking a person's feet out from under them for example will affect them whether it bothers them or not. Movements that work against the structure of the shoulder, elbow or wrist itself also work fine, so long as you are working to affect the function and alignment of the joint. An arm with a dislocated elbow does not move or function the way that a healthy arm will.

[gimpster]

This is one class of opponent that one doesn't want to confront unarmed.

Choke hold's work well, that's what the LAPD used to use to subdue monsters like these. The problem was they kept on resisting until the very end and some expired as a result or ended up with brain damage.

But it remains a good technique short of gutting the opponent with a knife or emptying a clip full of Gold dots into him.

[Bao]

Well, it can be entertaining as well...