A woman who doesn't feel pain | Hacker News Reader

A woman who doesn't feel pain

bbc.com

128 pointsducaale91 comments

I read in New Scientist that they've discovered a way in mice to turn off the connection between pain receptors and the emotional response to pain in the brain. So the mouse feels the pain in the sense of recognising it, but doesn't have a negative feeling associated with it. That's like a half-way point; you wouldn't injure yourself accidentally (as the woman), but you also wouldn't suffer if enduring chronic pain.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132143-900-silencin...

Experienced meditators are supposed to achieve this. I have read that they can have surgery without anesthetics (Gandhi supposedly did it too). They feel the pain but they do not suffer from it.

source please.

Performing a double blind test on whether meditation can help you avoid pain would probably be unethical. Most of the claims about meditation are not verified.

You could certainly expect to avoid some pain by meditating. Maybe you picked up a coffee cup that is a little too warm, and you just "mind-over-matter" through it. Sure.

But if you got shot? Well, I can't imagine a scientist is going to feel comfortable actually testing anyone claiming they could meditate their way through that.

> Performing a double blind test on whether meditation can help you avoid pain would probably be unethical

Um... how does one even perform such a test? It's not like you don't know you're meditating.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S152659000...

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2010-01983-012

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030439591...

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/31/14/5540

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/35/46/15307

Naively it makes sense, pain is just a sensation, but suffering is more complex. I doubt that we can truly shit off sensitivity to noxious stimuli, but meditation (and maybe some generic factors) seem like a way to manage reactions to that stimuli. Having said that, and skimming the links, I’d guess there’s a limit. A lot of what we’d naively expect to be excruciating is more upsetting and distressing than purely painful. Some things however, like inflammation of the trigemanal nerve, is really a source of intractable pain. I have my doubts that meditation would be of much use in that context, or extreme osteogenic pain.

You don't need to meditate to achieve this. You just need nitrous oxide.

This is great for going to the dentist, but I suppose it's not so great for managing chronic pain, however.

Wouldn't it be more natural to say, you don't need nitrous oxide to achieve this, you can practice to manage chronic pain.

"Natural" is just a buzzword. People have eaten plants for medicinal purposes since pre-historic times. Why should we shy away from advances in medicine and force the patients to re-wire their brains instead?

Meditation is unnatural. The natural thing is to experience pain when something painful happens.

Meditators still experience pain. They just train to "objectively" observe pain as pain, without creating more resistance - i.e. avoiding the "second arrow" https://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/sn/sn36/sn36.006.th...

IMHO there is currently no way to re-program your mind like that with external means.

I get cluster headaches or something similar - still being diagnosed. Anyways, they're extremely painful, by far the most pain I've ever experienced. I have a meditation/visualization I do that largely negates the pain. I actually got the idea from The Dresden Files books, oddly enough - the main character does something similar at a few points throughout the series.

It works, but only if I can wholly concentrate on it.

Can you share details? I have tried to work with pain and meditation but I have always failed with headaches. They seem to consume me totally.

I get migraines. Sign me up!

I'm baffled by the fact she only realized it when she was 65. I understand that when you were born like that it might just be normal, and maybe you don't put too much thought into it, but it's just... Didn't she ever wonder why other people scream like crazy when they touch a hot pan, hit their head, and she doesn't? Didn't other people realize in those 65 years that she doesn't have any reaction when it happens to her? Did she maybe just "learn" to say ouch when she hits her toe against the door frame, because that's what others do?

Also how did she not die as a child? When you never get the negative feedback of touching something got, cutting yourself, breaking a rib falling off a tree... This is just crazy to me, more than the fact that this condition actually exists.

I read the same story from NY Times, which had a more detailed write up. She likely inherited the genes from her dad. "Likely" because they can't test her dad's genes since he's deceased. Her dad didn't really feel pain either, so growing up it was not that abnormal.

Her son has a similar mutation but daughter doesn't.

NY Times Article: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/28/health/woman-pain-anxiety...

Thanks, that clears it up some more. It also reads like at least her husband must have noticed, but apparently since reddit etc. wasn't a thing when they were younger they never felt the urge to make posts about it all over the internet and getting everyone's attention. ;)

Right. You're normal, and everyone else are just whingers.

Reminds me of Ferro, in Abercrombie's First Law trilogy. She felt no pain. But she was not at all happy. More like always angry.

That was such an amazing series, and I found it had a lasting emotional impact. I still feel vaguely hurt and angry when I think about it!

Same here. I've read that, on one level, it's a satire on the Ring Trilogy. It's almost pure tragedy (with issues resolved through destruction) but has some very sweet comedy (with issues resolved through friendship and marriage).

And there are virtually no pure heroes or villains. I mean, he gets you feeling sympathetic with an expert torturer. And with a bunch of more-or-less psychotic marauders. Because he gets to to understand what's shaped them. What they've been through. And as well, it's loaded with great fight sequences.

If you haven't read his other books in that world, I highly recommend it. There's one that's largely about Logen.

I would certainly have died as a child... given the stuff I enjoy doing, the lack of pain would probably have manifested as a feeling of total invincibility. I'm pretty sure therefore, I'd be dead.

Though it does lead you to wonder just what the limits are of how much the body could tolerate before it breaks in the absence of pain.

> Didn't she ever wonder why other people scream like crazy when they touch a hot pan...

Kids learn to do this regardless of pain. And even adults do feel pain when they believe that they should feel pain (but really don't). So I don't think it needs to be super obvious.

I recall a story decades ago about a kid who couldn't feel pain. He wound up massively injuring himself playing football with a broken leg.

This reminded me of the delightful David Foster Wallace bit:

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

A lot of apparently normal people don't realise that they're a psychopath. They learn to imitate empathy by rote, but they don't actually experience it and don't realise that anything is missing in their perception of the world.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/outintheopen/impostors-1.4695876/ho...

For anyone curious about why pain is an incredible predictor of/protector from danger, and why lack of pain experiences often leads to massive injury and early death, please watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCF1_Fs00nM

The lecture is given by a respected pain research scientist, and it also covers much of modern pain science (including why the biomedical model of pain is outdated and how the biopsychosocial model of pain is more representative of observations of human pain experiences).

Not feeling pain can have some really disabiliting effect on one's life. A rather famous player in the Counter-Strike community suffers from a rare genetic disease that make him feel much less pain than normal. He started to scratch his nose out of habit when he was a kid, and eventually it came off over the course of years of scratching. His name is lo0p__ : https://www.twitch.tv/lo0p__

Edit: You can see him explain the effects of not feeling pain in this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XalQkahQbpE

I mean pain is, well, pain to deal with but we (and many other animals) evolved it for a reason.

Here's an AMA he did, if anyone is interested in reading more about him specifically:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4xmbu9/iama_16_year_o...

Whoa, that's gnarly. I'm curious how someone like this would be able to perform in physically demanding activities such as weight lifting or something like track. I wonder if they'd be able to push their bodies past normal limits because of (possibly) not feeling muscle fatigue.

This seems to be the paper referred to in the article:

Srivastava & Cox, "Microdeletion in a FAAH pseudogene identified in a patient with high anandamide concentrations and pain insensitivity" (22 Feb 2019) https://bjanaesthesia.org/article/S0007-0912(19)30138-2/full...

Pain free I believe, but I call bullshit on this part of the story: "When he found I hadn't had any, he checked my medical history and found I had never asked for painkillers."

Ha!! Like you can just "check someone's medical history." Yeah right! As if that history were in a single, easily queried database or something! Everyone knows real human medical histories are spread out over thousands of dog-eared pages hanging out of faded, worn-out folders located in dozens of doctors offices and hospitals across this great country of ours! What planet does that woman live on?!!

The East or West coast of US?

You don't understand how important a feedback signal pain is until it's gone.

I dated a girl who had a brain tumor removed as a child. As a result of this she had an incredibly high tolerance for pain. I don't mean stub-your-toe tolerance. I mean beat-me-with-a-belt-so-I-can-feel-something tolerance. Obviously it made for some interesting fun. Eventually I had to stop dating her out of fear I was going to permanently injure her in her search for pain sensations. She literally scared me.

I'm really curious... (I'm a sadist, but only with consent and permanent injury is a hard nope) did you try electricity? I've played with several folks with high pain tolerance, and electroplay really seems to "cut through" everybody's defenses. But it's not obvious how that would go, if the neurological signals are getting blocked...

Why do you get off on hurting people?

I'm guessing the same reason people get off on, say, looking at big asses (or feet). Why does anybody get off on anything besides regular, biological, strictly-procreational sex?

Honestly? The thing I like the most about sex is the noises my partner makes. And what's the best sound somebody can make during sex? Screaming, of course.

Turns out, making people scream (when they want to be screaming) is all that really does it for me: sex is wet and sticky and gross and I kinda hate it.

On either end of the paddle, though; I think it's all about the endorphins?

Slightly OT, but since it's rare to talk with a self-identified sadist:

Do you think you'd experience the same thrill torturing(?) a masochist as you would a non-masochist?

> Do you think you'd experience the same thrill torturing(?) a masochist as you would a non-masochist?

Oh my god, no, absolutely not. It makes me sick to even think of doing that shit to somebody who doesn't want it. Nevermind the legal consequences, I couldn't live with myself.

She wanted to. By then I was tired of all the games. Not my thing.

Fair, fair. Serious talk, that sounds traumatizing.

I've heard some similar stories from folks who did things for their partners, who didn't enjoy the things they were doing. It's weird because you feel like you're the responsible one; you're in control, holding the belt or whatever! But you're not really in control. You're the one pushing your boundaries, inexperienced and barely-willing, and probably completely unprepared.

I have a lot of sympathy for you, and it's okay to be upset. If these memories are still painful, I'd heartily recommend talking to a professional.

As for people in her position: go to fetlife, get in touch with your local community, and find somebody who (a) knows what they're doing and won't damage you, and (b) gives free, prior and informed consent. Don't just demand/convince your vanilla partner to try shit out -- that's neither free nor informed; and if your demands escalate in-scene, then it's not prior.

I can't imagine how people would discover they may be into these things if the only way to have contact with it would be through the scene.

I knew a girl who couldn't get drunk (bottle of vodka and no effect), she had to fake it sometimes not to look alcoholic. She said she wasn't the only one in the family.

Calling bullshit.

Probably a alcoholic or something.

A quick Google search yields people like these: https://www.quora.com/Is-there-anyone-that-cannot-get-drunk

A quick Google search of "quora" can also yield numerous sources stating it is full of bullshit. Of course, a quick Google search of any of those further sources will probably lead to the same thing...

I was at first too, but it's an odd story to brag about and it actually was a complaint :)

The less negative "drunk" effects you have, the more likely you are to become an alcoholic, research suggests, because you still get addicted, and it's less quickly obvious that you need to moderate yourself https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/3683577/Scientists-...

Was her name Marion Ravenwood?

And the opposite where you get drunk without drinking: Auto-brewery syndrome, also known as gut fermentation syndrome

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-brewery_syndrome

Was she much smarter than average? Von Neumann was reputed to be immune to drink and was the smartest person to ever live.

The story makes no sense. She probably was an alcoholic.

If she wasn't, why would she consume an entire bottle of vodka?

What's also interesting is the other consequences of her condition. She doesn't get fear or adrenaline response and might be able to heal faster than most people.

Right, I noticed that too. Also the "happy gene" thing.

I recall from Hofstadter the idea that feedback loops in consciousness rely on some of the same components that mediate the senses. So anger and fear are rather like mental pain.

Even more interesting there is also a a women who exists who literally cannot feel any fear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M._(patient)

There is a radiolab podcast where they actually interview her.

For some insight into the value of pain, and the hazards of being without it, Pain: the Gift Nobody Wants (also published as The Gift of Pain) by Paul Brand & Philip Yancey is a fascinating read.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Pain-Nobody-Wants-Paul-Brand/dp/006...

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Gift-Pain-Hurt-What-About/dp/031022...

For people suffering from chronic pain, the benefits of turning off pain completely would far outweigh the risks.

Look up Gabby Gingras if you're not convinced how dangerous that condition is. She became legally blind from scratching her own eyes as a child (among other things).

There was a documentary called a life without pain a few years ago about her and a boy from Norway with the same condition. Kids with this condition usually die at a very young age due to injuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Life_Without_Pain

This confuses me a little. I remember when I was a kid watching a documentary about this condition. It is generally a severe danger to the person as they do not naturally learn the penalties for a broken bone or severe burn. Pain is a very important signal. The media articles on this at the moment are making it sound never heard of before and possibly something we want.

Having no pain, okay.

But having no anxiety? wow, that sounds like true heaven to anxious me.

You would think the same about pain if you were in chronic, debilitating pain.

Can confirm. Chronic pain sucks.

I have chronic pain. I hate that it makes my anxiety even worse and it's anxiety what really burdens me the most (feeling nonfunctional, feeling anxious, having panic attacks or triggers)

Having appropriate responses to stimuli is vastly more useful.

Often increasing anxiety is very much the appropriate response to one's experiences, but still not a useful one.

Somewhat tautological, but I equate "useful" and "appropriate". Anxiety can be useful (if it's not crippling), and is certainly understandable. But if it is debilitating, it's not particularly useful, and hence, is inappropriate.

I'm surprised she didn't lose more limbs!

I remember reading about this condition in a natural science schoolbook, along with an explanation that it's dangerous for the affected person, since they are lacking the signals warning them their body has a problem.

Can some one like this pickup a sport like running and run to death?

You can probably get paralyzed just by sitting since you are no longer shifting your legs around in response to mild discomfort

Wondering as well. Could they be incredible in some cardio sport because they could push themselves. Or would they push too hard? Or is the type of pain different so they feel discomfort same as we do?

What about holding your breath? The pain is from co2 in your lungs, not a lack of o2, so it is mostly your brain/will stopping you from holding it longer.

We have a small village in Sweden that is known for roughly 40 cases of the same thing. They're basically made fun of because a lot of the village population are related so it could be a case of inbreeding among relatives.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...

Sounds horrible actually, just imagine living with all those little risks of hurting yourself everyday. I remember I was amazed when ophthalmologist warned me not to touch my eyes 30 mins after the eye examination because anesthetics numb the sensation enough that you can accidentally cause the cornea abrasion without noticing it. This is like it, but applied to your whole body for whole life.

I can't find the condition name in the article but I remember a House MD episode (3x14) that the patient had this condition and it was called CIPA (Congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congenital_insensitivity_to_pa...

House MD had an episode about this condition in 2007: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0917153/

You would think a friend might mention it - I would think a close friend must notice a complete lack of pain response.

No pain during child birth. Can you imagine the look on those doctors' faces.

'One last push'....'would you mind passing me another magazine please doctor?'

They probably figured that she got a little too much painkiller. When something unexpected happens the human mind usually tries to attribute it to something that is already known.

According to the article, her medical records said never been given painkillers (although it could well be she's never asked for painkillers, which I suppose is a different thing all together.)

In the UK at least, most women only use Entonox (a mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide) for pain relief, and painkillers are only administered during lengthy pregnancy's. I wouldn't be surprised if the doctors/midwives were a little baffled, but just figured she was a hard nut.

This turns out to be very dangerous for the mother. I saw a documentary about a group of women with a similar condition and one almost died because her pelvis broke during delivery but she didn't realize there was a problem until weeks later.

"Jo Cameron only realises her skin is burning when she smells singed flesh. She often burns her arms on the oven, but feels no pain to warn her."

Maybe stop cooking?

She has to feel some pain, otherwise she would have severely damaged her fingers, toes over the years like people with diabetic neuropathy or leprosy do.

Maybe she can sense or feel? This article didn't explain it in detail, what is the tolerance of pain, is it just skin or muscle. How does it even affect the sleep cycle since muscles don't feel fatigue? She could've broken many Guinness records but she didn't.

I don’t think that this is a good thing to have. Leprosy patients lose their fingers because of lack of pain.

I know that's part of it, but there's got to be something more going on with leprosy patients. Random bruises and scratches do not normally fester until things start falling off, even if you ignore them.

Paul Brand's book Pain: the Gift Nobody Wants (also published as The Gift of Pain), which I mentioned in another comment, deals with this at some length -- he worked in India and was a pioneer in leprosy understanding and treatment.

> even if you ignore them

But you don't ignore them. If you have a bruise on your shin, you may not think much about it, but it's pretty unlikely that you'll bump your leg just as hard again on the coffee table on the same spot.

Similar:

Indian chef dips his BARE HANDS in searing 200C cooking oil to fry street food... and doesn't suffer any burns...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3317037/Indian-chef...

This has to be complete BS or he doesn't have an organic hand. Protein WILL NOT stand up to that heat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com