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Comment by werid | Hacker News Reader

"She was burned with a laser, and quite liked the experience."

I recently suffered 2nd and 3rd degree burns over much of my right leg. If she liked the experience of being burned, they were doing it wrong. I know that a 1st degree laser burn is much less painful than what I experienced, but burns are some of the worst pain you can experience. I would say its as much of a mental "game" as it is physical reaction. 2 shots of dilaudid knocked the pain from an 8-10 to a 3-4 for me. I cannot imagine the hell some people experience with large swaths of their bodies being burned. I guess I've strayed off topic some, but I just cant imagine a burn as every being pleasurable.

Well, for someone who's never experienced pain, it's probably more novel than anything else. She has no instinctual understanding of the meaning of pain.

If anything, her ability to experience pain may represent a good thing in her mind. People without pain can do incredible damage to themselves unknowingly, and many have serious injuries from when they were children and hadn't yet trained themselves to be cautious. So, to her, getting to experience pain may represent relief from the stress and vigilance of trying to deliberately protect her body.

So she didn't actually experience pain as defined in a dictionary.

She probably liked the novelty of it; she had never felt pain before, so it was completely new to her.

Eh, I know a number of masochists who "quite like the experience" of pain.

They like to have skin cut, salt pored in? Scraping their eyeballs over a blackboard until they bleed?

I think your are talking about different pain than laser burning.

Most definitions of pain of pain contain terms like torment, distress, suffering. Not what someone would like. If someone never felt pain before and they say upon feeling something that they like it, you think they really feel pain? It sounds more likely to me that she felt something different. She wouldn't know of course, if what she felt was pain.

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