Autism & Pain Sensation
A lot of the information about identifying autism lists, as a possible criterion, that an autistic person might have an unusually intense reaction, or else no reaction at all, to painful stimuli. I've also read from Temple Grandin, an autistic animal behaviorist who believes that autistic people think a lot like animals (with, obviously, more sophisticated brains), that she believes she feels pain at the same level as anyone else; only that she attaches very little emotional significance to it, and is thus less affected.
I'm pretty weird in the way I react to pain. Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter; sometimes, it's the end of the world, completely overwhelming attempts to think rationally. It's very unpredictable, but I think it has to do with both the neurological and emotional processing of the stimulus that results in pain.
Most of the time, if I hurt myself because I'm clumsy--bumping into something or whatever--I just don't react at all, even though it does hurt. Bruises, cuts, burns, whatever... I just find them on myself and don't have any idea where they came from, or just vaguely recall getting an injury I immediately forgot about because it just didn't seem to matter.
But menstrual cramps have me in bed because I'm too dizzy to stand. They checked my blood pressure and red-blood count when I went to the ER for it, and it turned out I was passing out from pain alone, not dehydration or blood loss. Having a pulse of something like 30-40 beats per minute, apparently, is a sign of being in severe pain... my normal pulse rate is about 70. Go figure.
Tension headaches--which are less painful than many injuries I've had--for some reason bother me much more than, for example, a skinned knee... something that, objectively, hurts more than a headache; but subjectively, the headache makes me want to lie down, and I don't even notice the skinned knee after I make sure it isn't leaking blood on my clothes.
Injections... wow, those I was mortally afraid of until my late teens. Mom says I had a bad experience when I was receiving my vaccinations as a small child, of a doctor who basically pinned me and stabbed me, since I was in meltdown mode at the time and he couldn't get me to stay still... Naturally that ended in a sort of needle-phobia. Apparently you are not supposed to feel injections and other medical stuff involving needles nearly as much as I do; I generally whimper a bit if I'm getting a flu shot or something, and I used to be pretty scared of my mom taking a splinter out of my finger. I'm sure emotion has a big role to play when it comes to pain; otherwise, why would I feel a splinter removal to be so painful when my mom did it, but not when I did?
I used to self-injure, and that was comforting; I felt the pain, but it didn't seem "bad" somehow. I used to pull out my hair, while I was stopping the self-injury. That's a clear case of the emotional impact of pain being completely different from what it usually is. Usually, the emotional impact of pain is to irritate someone, to make them upset in some way--angry, anxious, despondent. SI, both repetitive and superficial types, seems to completely reverse that impact. The difference, of course, is that in the case of accidental injury or illness, the pain is not controllable; in the case of self-injury, it is deliberately caused. The emotional reaction to the pain is thus completely reversed, and the pain itself is not perceived in a negative manner.
I think maybe I react more to certain types of pain than others. It's as though it's not the actual pain level, but the sort of stimulus, that makes it easy or hard to deal with.
Oh, yes: An interesting thing about pain which I've discovered: It's possible to have a "pain" impulse coming from your nerves without any actual damage occurring. It seems like some sort of safety thing--a margin of error provided to make sure you don't under-react to a truly dangerous occurrence by setting the "pain" level at some level lower than actual damage.
I noticed this at first because I know it's possible to drink coffee that, if I stuck a finger into it, would be painful to touch--but when it's in my mouth, it's just pleasantly hot. It doesn't burn my mouth; but it feels like it's burning my finger! However, it's possible to get my hands used to that level of heat if the heat is slowly increased; you can try that with hot water, slowly increasing the temperature, on one hand; then stick the other hand under the same water--it should feel painfully hot to the newly exposed hand, though it doesn't actually do any damage (as you can tell, because the other hand--the one you slowly exposed to the water--feels heat but not pain). The effect can be maximized by putting one hand under hot (but not burning) water and the other into cold (but not freezing) water, and then switching.
Anyway, point: Pain is much more than just an objective measure of damage done to the body. Perception and emotion make a big difference.
How does that connect to autism? Well, we do experience both perception and emotion differently... Draw your own conclusions!
I'm pretty weird in the way I react to pain. Sometimes it doesn't seem to matter; sometimes, it's the end of the world, completely overwhelming attempts to think rationally. It's very unpredictable, but I think it has to do with both the neurological and emotional processing of the stimulus that results in pain.
Most of the time, if I hurt myself because I'm clumsy--bumping into something or whatever--I just don't react at all, even though it does hurt. Bruises, cuts, burns, whatever... I just find them on myself and don't have any idea where they came from, or just vaguely recall getting an injury I immediately forgot about because it just didn't seem to matter.
But menstrual cramps have me in bed because I'm too dizzy to stand. They checked my blood pressure and red-blood count when I went to the ER for it, and it turned out I was passing out from pain alone, not dehydration or blood loss. Having a pulse of something like 30-40 beats per minute, apparently, is a sign of being in severe pain... my normal pulse rate is about 70. Go figure.
Tension headaches--which are less painful than many injuries I've had--for some reason bother me much more than, for example, a skinned knee... something that, objectively, hurts more than a headache; but subjectively, the headache makes me want to lie down, and I don't even notice the skinned knee after I make sure it isn't leaking blood on my clothes.
Injections... wow, those I was mortally afraid of until my late teens. Mom says I had a bad experience when I was receiving my vaccinations as a small child, of a doctor who basically pinned me and stabbed me, since I was in meltdown mode at the time and he couldn't get me to stay still... Naturally that ended in a sort of needle-phobia. Apparently you are not supposed to feel injections and other medical stuff involving needles nearly as much as I do; I generally whimper a bit if I'm getting a flu shot or something, and I used to be pretty scared of my mom taking a splinter out of my finger. I'm sure emotion has a big role to play when it comes to pain; otherwise, why would I feel a splinter removal to be so painful when my mom did it, but not when I did?
I used to self-injure, and that was comforting; I felt the pain, but it didn't seem "bad" somehow. I used to pull out my hair, while I was stopping the self-injury. That's a clear case of the emotional impact of pain being completely different from what it usually is. Usually, the emotional impact of pain is to irritate someone, to make them upset in some way--angry, anxious, despondent. SI, both repetitive and superficial types, seems to completely reverse that impact. The difference, of course, is that in the case of accidental injury or illness, the pain is not controllable; in the case of self-injury, it is deliberately caused. The emotional reaction to the pain is thus completely reversed, and the pain itself is not perceived in a negative manner.
I think maybe I react more to certain types of pain than others. It's as though it's not the actual pain level, but the sort of stimulus, that makes it easy or hard to deal with.
Oh, yes: An interesting thing about pain which I've discovered: It's possible to have a "pain" impulse coming from your nerves without any actual damage occurring. It seems like some sort of safety thing--a margin of error provided to make sure you don't under-react to a truly dangerous occurrence by setting the "pain" level at some level lower than actual damage.
I noticed this at first because I know it's possible to drink coffee that, if I stuck a finger into it, would be painful to touch--but when it's in my mouth, it's just pleasantly hot. It doesn't burn my mouth; but it feels like it's burning my finger! However, it's possible to get my hands used to that level of heat if the heat is slowly increased; you can try that with hot water, slowly increasing the temperature, on one hand; then stick the other hand under the same water--it should feel painfully hot to the newly exposed hand, though it doesn't actually do any damage (as you can tell, because the other hand--the one you slowly exposed to the water--feels heat but not pain). The effect can be maximized by putting one hand under hot (but not burning) water and the other into cold (but not freezing) water, and then switching.
Anyway, point: Pain is much more than just an objective measure of damage done to the body. Perception and emotion make a big difference.
How does that connect to autism? Well, we do experience both perception and emotion differently... Draw your own conclusions!