Thirst & Pain
» Emotional Health
Anyone who has given it a second’s thought knows that response to pain will vary from person to person. And anyone with experience in S&M knows that a masochist’s ability to process pain is variable.
Hardcover players aside I don’t know that this research has much application to BDSM play but may help encourage mindfulness.
Dr Michael Farrell has used positron emission tomography to evaluate the effect of thirst on pain thresholds.
The results showed that people who were thirsty felt more pain.
Two regions of the brain, the pregenual cingulate and ventral orbitofrontal cortex, which were not turned on by either input alone, lit up suggesting a location where the two sensations were being integrated.
The researchers did not find that pain affected thirst levels, but Dr Farrell says this could be because the participants were not made very thirsty in the first place and any decrease would have been hard to measure.
Dr Farrell says the team had speculated there might be circuits in the brain that allow one sensation to modulate another, which is important from the point of view of survival.
“Hunger, thirst, tiredness and pain, for example, don’t conveniently happen at the same time, so it’s important for the body to prioritise,” he said.
