many factors to pain.. mental and emotional have very real effects on the physical...

"The strength of the pain signal, for example, can depend on what other sensory information is funneled to the spine at the same time."


He goes on to talk about 3 senarios..

soldier in a battle, wounded-not life threatening, death and carnage all around BUT gets to go home.
advanced stages of liver cancer-ghiven an experimantal drug
and enthusiastically having sex on a rough carpet..

In all cases the pain will not seem that painful..

"The brain's interpretation of pain can be extreamly subjective"

He goes on to talk about a study conducted in the 1980's.. Scientists look over records from a decades worth of of records of patients who had gallbladder surgery.
Turns out the patients who had a room with a view of tress outside thier wondows 'requested significantly less pain medication than thjose who looked out on blank walls'

"This is because the brain is not a mindless pain-ometer, simply measuring units of ouchness." I love how he writes! lol

"First, the emotional/interpretative level can be dissociated from the objective amount of pain signal that is coursing up to the brain from the spine. In other words, how much pain you feel, and how unpleasent that pain feels, can be two seperate things."


One more study (though he goes on)

groups dipping hands into hot water with brain imaging...

One group had the hypnotic suggestion that they feel no pain.

"The sensation-processing part of the cortex (kind of pain-ometer in this case) was activated to the identical extent in both cases reflecting the similar number of heat sensitive receptors being triggered to roughly the equivalent extent in both cases. But the emotionl parts of the brain activated only in the pre-hypnosis case. The pain was the same in both cases, the response to it was not."

not only that put emotion can alter not just the response but also "can alter how the spinal cord responds to painful information."


Just a couple examples..

Physical toughness in the real sense of fighting is not just physical. Just like with everythig else the body cvannot be compartmentalized like a machine.

genetics will play a factor but there is too much that shows how many variables there are IMO

Again-explain turning pimply kids into killers... Its genetics??

Genetics plays big roles but how we express them and how they are influenced hads big effects too. Which means no matter what our genes say they can be expressed to a much greater or lessor extent. HUGELY IMO

However if you believe you are a victom of chance and genetics with no say of your own...that will be true for you. IMO