Complex pains and pleasures
Pain and pleasure are easily recognizable sensations. But despite being intimate, we have jobs to explain with words what they are. We have tried it in this issue and wanted to describe pain and pleasure with the names and adjectives of science.
The first thing to say is that scientists are also not easy to understand and explain the mechanisms of pain and pleasure. On the one hand, they are very primitive and closely related to the survival of organisms. Pain protects us and pleasure drives us to meet needs. They are therefore integrated into the most basic chain of functions and, from an evolutionary point of view, have all their meaning.
But pain and pleasure go beyond mere survival. In exchange for all the pains we receive no protection and we have many behaviors that have no direct relation to survival, only for pleasure. If the chronic pain caused by osteoarthritis or the pleasure of looking at a work of art plays a role, scientists still do not know what it is.
They know better what are and how complex are the circuits that make pain and pleasures in the brain, and how their own experiences have much to say in the feeling of pain and pleasure, as well as in culture. In fact, culture is a powerful modulating element of the world of pain and pleasures, and cannot be fully understood without it. For example, only with the words of culture can we explain the unjust choice that human beings have sometimes made to end pleasure. And that said, I would not like to reinforce the image of pain and the pleasure of the hand, but highlight something more. And the names and adjectives of science need a healthy culture to explain and understand that there are no places in suffering, nor suffering in pleasure.
Zu idazle
Zientzia aldizkaria
