I remember seeing a video of a rubber arm experiment that goes through a series of exercises to convince someone's mind that a rubber arm placed against their shoulder is theirs, while the real one is blocked out of sight. Once these phantom sensations are in place, the organizer then hits the rubber hand with a hammer, causing great shock in the subject but no real harm. The immediate panic is exaggerated by the fact their mind can't actually move "their" hand out of the way when they see the swing coming.
Another study had organizers shine a harmless light on participants' arm for a few minutes and see how they react, allegedly for some sampling purpose. The twist was that they would have the real subjects stay in a waiting room beforehand and watch actors leave while appearing to be in considerable pain from the session where the light was targeting. They then experienced a significant burning sensation from the "laser" despite the organizers insisting it was harmless. Some would go as far as to raise their voice and demand the experiment stop.
The idea is that people can be convinced that something is painful just from others' reactions to it. This may have been what the organizers were actually testing for, and the electrical shock wasn't real or was barely large enough to felt. But OP was just immune to being influenced. I would expect the ability to follow cues from others has strong correlation to success at socializing, so considering they use 4chan OP might actually just be built different.
I mean, that's part of pain tolerance. It isn't just how much pain you feel, it's how much you can take.
Chronic pain has taught me a lot about what is and isn't bearable. Things that when they were new would leave me sobbing, I now don't even show more than a frown and gritted teeth for on a good day.
Part of that is taking the pain, putting it in a little box cake "I will not fucking quit" and throwing that box into the depths of the mind where it can't bother you for a while. Your body still hurts, you still know it hurts, but you keep going until you can't, and the pain can just fuck right off.
Now, let me stub my fucking toe while doing all that and it cuts right through all of that and says "nah, dawg, you gonna feel this". Different pain, and acute.
So, little shit like shocks and needles in muscles, and the like, you know they're coming, and they go right in the box with the chronic, and into the oubliette of agony.
That kind of pain testing? That's totally within mental techniques' ability to ignore. Your pulse will still change, blood pressure too, but it's still a distant thing that won't reach you for a while.
But everyone is different. You can take two people with the same injury, and they'll tolerate it differently, even if they're siblings of the same gender.
Part of that is indeed built in, but there is always a psychological component to pain perception.
Now, please note that I'm not saying that walling pain off and ignoring it until you've injured yourself is a good thing, much less better than letting pain guide your actions so that it isn't worse later. I'm just saying that the green text is realistic, and the person responding like that may not be bullshitting, they may just have worked on managing pain.
Yeah, I suffer from chronic pain, too, though not to the degree that you appear to. It's kind of funny because I know I'm really tired or mentally exhausted when I start noticing all the pain I normally have, but just haven't even noticed for hours before.
I've spent over a decade in the army where you're taught to pride yourself into "embracing the suck" and the whole "pain is all in your head" mentality. I have now taken a different career path and realized that this kind of mentality is only useful in very specific cases and is otherwise very bad. But to this day I still tend to downplay and hide my problems/pain whenever things are wrong.
That nearly got me killed a year ago when I showed up at the ER with pulmonary embolism (likely caused by a COVID infection) and the doctor dismissed it because I didn't look in pain enough for it to be that. The doctor sent me home untreated. It would have likely killed me had I not returned the day after to see another doctor who luckily took me seriously and got me a CT scan that revealed the problem.
Something similar happened to my dad. His "ignore the pain education" came from growing up on a very conservative family farm in the 50s and early 60s rather than from the military, but the result was about the same.
One day, he rang up his GP complaining that his chest "hurt a little bit". His doctor, knowing how much pain he would have to be in to ever mention it to others told him to get to the nearest hospital immediately.
My dad did so, (DRIVING HIMSELF) and sure enough, his heart was so clogged up that he needed an emergency quadruple bypass.
If he'd had said the same thing to a doctor who didn't know him and his insanely high learned pain threshold, or followed his initial instinct of not complaining , he would have died home alone at only 50.
Instead, he celebrated his 73rd birthday with friends and family a little over 6 months ago because he went against his son of a farmer "training".
I can't find the scene, but Supernaturalhad a scene like that. Sam had recently gotten back from Hell, and he got hurt pretty bad (forgot how, but something like a broken rib or gunshot wound), and a doctor asked him what his pain level was, with 1 being barely noticeable to 10 being the worst pain he ever experienced. He stares off into the distance and says something like "3."
They don't have to tell you the truth. It could have been to test whether being told that it's "men vs women" affects the readings test subjects provide
Not could, will. These days it's considered unethical not to debrief explaining any deceptive elements of the study. It can also be valuable because the people conducting the study can use it as a chance to find out if the participants knew about the deception, in case that knowledge might have affected the results.
