A Natural History of the Senses

by Diane Ackerman

  Often our fear of pain contributes to it. Our culture expects childbirth to be a deeply painful event, and so, for us, it is. Women from other cultures stop their work in the fields to give birth, returning to the fields immediately afterward. Initiation and adolescence rites around the world often involve penetrating pain, which initiates must endure to prove themselves worthy. In the sun dance of the Sioux, for instance, a young warrior would allow the skin of his chest to be pierced by iron rods; then he was hung from a stanchion. When I was in Istanbul in the 1970s, I saw teenage boys dressed in shiny silk fezzes and silk suits decorated with glitter. They were preparing for circumcision, a festive event in the life of a Turk, which occurs at around the age of fifteen. No anesthetic is used; instead, a boy is given a jelly candy to chew. Sir Richard Burton’s writings abound with descriptions of tribal mutilation and torture rituals, including one in which a shaman removes an apron of flesh from the front of a boy, cutting all the way from the stomach to the thighs, producing a huge white scar.

  Women in some cultures go through many painful initiation rites, often including circumcision, which removes or destroys the clitoris. Being able to endure the pain of childbirth is expected of women, but there are also disguised rites of pain, pain that is endured for the sake of health or beauty. Women have their legs waxed as a matter of fashion, and have done so throughout the ages. When mine were waxed at a Manhattan beauty salon recently, the pain, which began like 10,000 bees stinging me simultaneously, was excruciating. Change the woman from a Rumanian cosmetician to a German Gestapo agent. Change the room from a cubicle in a beauty emporium to a prison cell. Keep the level of pain exactly the same, and it easily qualifies as torture. We tend to think of torture in the name of beauty as an aberration of the ancients, but there are modern scourging parlors. People have always mutilated their skins, often enduring pain to be beautiful, as if the pain chastened the beauty, gave it the special veneer of sacrifice. Many women experience extreme pain during their periods each month, but they accept the pain because they understand that it’s not caused by someone else, it’s not malicious, and it doesn’t surprise them; and this makes all the difference.

  There are also illusions of pain as vivid as optical illusions, times when the sufferer imagines he or she feels pain that cannot possibly exist. In some cultures, the father experiences a false pregnancy—couvade as it’s called—and takes to bed with childbirth pains, going through his own arduous experience of having a baby. The internal organs don’t have many pain receptors (the skin is supposed to be the guard post), so people often feel “referred pain” when one of their organs is in trouble. Heart attacks frequently produce a pain in the stomach, the left arm, or the shoulder. When this happens, the brain can’t figure out exactly where the message is coming from. In the classic phenomenon of phantom-limb pain, the brain gets faulty signals and continues to feel pain in a limb that has been amputated; such pain can be torturous, perverse, and maddening, since there is nothing physically present to hurt.

  Pain has plagued us throughout the history of our species. We spend our lives trying to avoid it, and, from one point of view, what we call “happiness” may be just the absence of pain. Yet it is difficult to define pain, which may be sharp, dull, shooting, throbbing, imaginary, or referred. We have many pains that surge from within as cramps and aches. And we also talk about emotional distress as pain. Pains are often combined, the emotional with the physical, and the physical with the physical. When you burn yourself, the skin swells and blisters, and when the blister breaks, the skin hurts in yet another way. A wound may become infected. Then histamine and serotonin are released, which dilate the blood vessels and trigger a pain response. Not all internal injuries can be felt (it’s possible to do brain surgery under a local anesthetic), but illnesses that constrict blood flow often are: Angina pectoris, for example, which occurs when the coronary arteries shrink too tight for blood to comfortably pass. Even intense pain often eludes accurate description, as Virginia Woolf reminds us in her essay “On Being Ill”: “English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache … let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”

  EASING PAIN

  Just as there are many forms of pain, there are many remedies for it. Anesthetics like novocaine or cocaine either block the body’s ability to send high-frequency pain signals to the brain or will not allow sodium to flow into the nerve cell. Some drugs manage to confuse the signals given at different stages of the pain message. Naturally occurring opiates called endorphins occupy the receptor sites so that they can’t receive the neural transmitter’s message of pain.* Cocaine interferes with the neural transmitters in just this way. Part of the reason heroin addicts need more and more of the drug to get high is because that drug causes the body to produce less of its own endorphins and begins to depend on the heroin to take over their task. This increased threshold can also happen among arthritis sufferers or other long-term heavy users of simple analgesics. Aspirin works by inhibiting the flow of substances that stimulates pain receptors when you have an injury, so that you don’t receive as many pain impulses. Continuous use of any analgesic can neutralize its beneficial effect, but only twenty minutes of aerobic exercise is enough to stimulate the body to produce more endorphins, natural painkillers. Shifting your attention to something else will distract you from pain; pain requires our full attention. A simple and effective form of pain relief comes from “lateral inhibition”: If a mob of neurons all try to respond at once they get blocked. If you stub your toe and then rub the area around it, the pain will subside in the mass confusion. If you apply ice to a bruise, it will not only help with swelling, it will also transmit cold messages instead of pain messages. During sex, we tend not to mind a certain amount of pain (indeed, for some people, pain seems to heighten the pleasure) and that may be because of lateral stimulation—the brain is receiving so many pleasure signals it doesn’t pay much attention to those of moderate pain. Relaxation techniques, hypnosis, acupuncture, and placebos can fool the body into producing endorphins, and stop the pain message from being sent out. We don’t feel electricity, of course, we feel sensations; but if the electrical code for pain isn’t handed around, we don’t feel pain. Human beings can withstand enormous amounts of pain (women have higher pain thresholds than men), but not without chemical help, or sleight of mind. During pregnancy, endorphin levels rise as the time of delivery gets closer. One researcher has even suggested that a pregnant woman craves certain foods because they’re high in substances that produce serotonin, which the woman will need to endure the pain of childbirth.

  I once knew a songwriter with a lovely sherbety voice, who played guitar and sang in nightclubs in Pennsylvania. At the age of twenty-eight her arthritis was so acute that she had to loosen up her hands before each performance by baking them in gloves of warm wax. In time the pain grew too stubborn, and she gave up performing for teaching. For long-term sufferers, “Pain is greedy, boorish, meanly debilitating,” as neurologist Russell Martin says in Matters Gray and White. “It is cruel and calamitous and often constant, and, as its Latin root poena implies, it is the corporeal punishment each of us ultimately suffers for being alive.” In a number of specialized pain-control centers around the country, it’s understood that pain is as much an emotional and psychological affliction as a physical one. Teams of neurologists, psychologists, physical therapists, and other angologists (people who study pain) work with those disabled by chronic pain, and try to find ways through the madness of their patients’ bodies.

  THE POINT OF PAIN

  Why human beings feel pain has been the subject of theological debate, philosophical schisms, psychoanalytical edicts, and mumbo jumbo for centuries. Pain was the punishment for wrongdoing in the Garden of Eden. Pain was the price one paid for not being morally perfect. Pain was a self-affliction brought about by sexual repression. Pain was dished out by vengeful god
s, or was the result of falling out of harmony with nature. Indeed, our word holy goes back through Old English to haelan, “to heal,” and the Indo-European kailo, which meant “whole” or “uninjured.” The purpose of pain is to warn the body about possible injury. Millions of free nerve endings alarm us; whenever they’re hit, we feel pain. Slam our elbow against a bookcase, and, as Russell Martin describes the process:

  … a number of chemical substances such as prostaglandins, histamine, bradykinin, and others stored in or near the nerve endings at the site of the injury are suddenly released. Prostaglandins quickly increase blood circulation to the damaged area, facilitating the infection-fighting and healing functions of the blood’s white cells, antibodies, and oxygen. Together with bradykinin and other substances, present in only minute quantities, prostaglandins also stimulate the nerve endings, causing them to transmit electrical impulses along the length of the affected sensory nerve to its junction with the “dorsal horn” of the spinal cord, a strip of gray-matter tissue running the length of the spinal cord, which collects sensory signals from all parts of the body and relays them to the brain—first to the thalamus, where pain is first “felt,” then on to the “sensory strip” of the cerebral cortex, where the pain becomes conscious, its location and intensity perceived.

  According to the pattern theory, nerve impulses combine to telegraph those Morse-code-like messages of pain. Some pains just rush to the spinal cord, so that we can flinch if we touch a hot stove; and we call this a reflex, by which we mean that, as we always suspected, we can act without thinking and we frequently do. Acute pain—a ripped ligament, a burn—hurts so badly that we’ll immobilize part of the body long enough for it to heal. A prick of the skin may not hurt the most, but it hurts the fastest, the signal traveling to the brain at ninety-eight feet per second. Burning or aching travels slower (about six and a half feet per second). Leg pains sometimes travel at up to 290 miles per hour. We pay no attention to our internal workings unless something goes wrong, when we might feel hunger pangs, or headaches, or thirst. Still, scientists do not agree on exactly what pain is. Some say it’s a response of specific receptors to specific dangers—noxious chemicals, burning, stabbing or cutting, freezing—and others feel that it’s much more ambiguous, an extreme sensory stimulation of any kind, because, in the delicate ecosystem of our body, too much of anything will disturb the balance. So, in this sense, pain really is a sign that we’re out of harmony with Nature. When we’re in pain the localized place hurts but the entire body responds. We grow sweaty, our pupils dilate, our blood pressure shoots up. Oddly enough, the same thing happens when we’re angry or scared. There is a deep emotional component to pain. If we’re badly hurt, we might also be afraid. And what are we to make of those individuals who are sadomasochists, who combine pleasure with pain?

  In his famous experiments, Ivan Pavlov gave dogs a strong electric shock, which pained them severely. Then he fed them each day after a painful shock, conditioning them to associate the shock with something positive. Even when he increased the strength of the shock, they wagged their tails and salivated in expectation of dinner. In other experiments, he allowed cats to hit a switch that shocked them and fed them at the same time, and found they were eager to put up with the shock in order to get the food.

  Kafka wrote short stories in which people endure pain professionally, as “hunger artists” or other self-mutilators; audiences often pay for the dubious privilege of watching someone suffer. There have always been performers of pain, artists of self-mutilation, to whom pain has a different meaning than for the rest of us. Edward Gibson, a turn-of-the-century vaudeville performer billed as “the human pincushion,” let customers stick pins into him and at one point acted out a crucifixion on stage, nails piercing his hands and feet. It was only because people in the audience started fainting that authorities stopped his performance. Then there was the notorious German self-mutilator, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose “performances” of self-inflicted razor slashes and knife wounds filled a public hungry for sadism with unparallelled horror. Do these people not feel pain at all? Are their pleasure and pain centers cross-wired by mistake? Or, like T. E. Lawrence, do they feel pain in all its molten terror and not mind?

  KISSING

  Sex is the ultimate intimacy, the ultimate touching when, like two paramecia, we engulf one another. We play at devouring each other, digesting each other, we nurse on each other, drink each other’s fluids, actually get under each other’s skin. Kissing, we share one breath, open the sealed fortress of our body to our lover. We shelter under a warm net of kisses. We drink from the well of each other’s mouths. Setting out on a kiss caravan of the other’s body, we map the new terrain with our fingertips and lips, pausing at the oasis of a nipple, the hillock of a thigh, the backbone’s meandering riverbed. It is a kind of pilgrimage of touch, which leads us to the temple of our desire.

  We most often touch a lover’s genitals before we actually see them. For the most part, our leftover puritanism doesn’t condone exhibiting ourselves to each other naked before we’ve kissed and fondled first. There is an etiquette, a protocol, even in impetuous, runaway sex. But kissing can happen right away, and, if people care for each other, then it’s less a prelude to mating than a sign of deep regard. There are wild, hungry kisses or there are rollicking kisses, and there are kisses fluttery and soft as the feathers of cockatoos. It’s as if, in the complex language of love, there were a word that could only be spoken by lips when lips touch, a silent contract sealed with a kiss. One style of sex can be bare bones, fundamental and unromantic, but a kiss is the height of voluptuousness, an expense of time and an expanse of spirit in the sweet toil of romance, when one’s bones quiver, anticipation rockets, but gratification is kept at bay on purpose, in exquisite torment, to build to a succulent crescendo of emotion and passion.

  When I was in high school in the early sixties, nice girls didn’t go all the way—most of us wouldn’t have known how to. But man, could we kiss! We kissed for hours in the busted-up front seat of a borrowed Chevy, which, in motion, sounded like a broken dinette set; we kissed inventively, clutching our boyfriends from behind as we straddled motorcycles, whose vibrations turned our hips to jelly; we kissed extravagantly beside a turtlearium in the park, or at the local rose garden or zoo; we kissed delicately, in waves of sipping and puckering; we kissed torridly, with tongues like hot pokers; we kissed timelessly, because lovers throughout the ages knew our longing; we kissed wildly, almost painfully, with tough, soul-stealing rigor; we kissed elaborately, as if we were inventing kisses for the first time; we kissed furtively when we met in the hallways between classes; we kissed soulfully in the shadows at concerts, the way we thought musical knights of passion like The Righteous Brothers and their ladies did; we kissed articles of clothing or objects belonging to our boyfriends; we kissed our hands when we blew our boyfriends kisses across the street; we kissed our pillows at night, pretending they were mates; we kissed shamelessly, with all the robust sappiness of youth; we kissed as if kissing could save us from ourselves.