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Imagine you are part of a competition where you put your hand in a pot of water and it is heated. Your pain threshold is quantified as the temperature (T) where you withdraw your hand. The person with the highest pain threshold wins a rediculous sum of money.

Now, we know there will be variability in T. My question is whether this variability in T primarily reflects differences in the ability to tolerate pain, or simply differences in the amount of pain produced by a given temperature (i.e., neurological differences). If the former is the case, then this competition will truly find the person with the most "grit". However, if the latter is true, all we are doing is identifying people with particularly insensitive neurology, and they may actually be no "tougher", mentally, than the others.

I would expect that the utility of the reward would play some part in each subjects willingness to tolerate pain. That is why the reward is a very large sum of money, such that the utility of the reward effectively "saturates" each subjects tolerance for pain (i.e., assume each subject is very motivated to accept pain).

Can we decide between the two options?

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    Possibly related and/or useful: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pain/#conclusion. –  Nov 08 '13 at 15:27
  • Consider the classical experiments on hypnosis, which pretty much establish that it is nothing more than a ritual that openly grants permission to submit to an authority, but it also still really works. Whether it is the ritual form or the open permission to submit to authority, if one of those can raise your tolerance for pain, doesn't that have to be subjective? –  Mar 02 '18 at 03:20

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After you start looking into the neurology of pain, questions like these don't really make sense any more. It's neurons all the way through, you know.

You could identify people who have relatively few or low-activity thermal pain receptors. And you'd identify people who have different levels of signaling or regulation at a bunch of other levels of processing. (Along the way you'd probably get to shoot people with lasers.) There are differences in thermal tolerance, if that's what you're asking. And there are differences many other places also.

But you don't have to go very far before the neurobiology becomes murky. What exactly is regulating what, and how? That's hard to say even when the signals reach the spinal cord. And what, precisely, is "grit"?

You will instead--after appropriate research has been done--find yourself making statements like, "This chap has an amazing (p < 0.001) ability to maintain attention despite high levels nociceptive input to the dorsal horn."

So the phenomena are objective. (Here's a walkthrough.)

Figuring out what counts as "grit" is subjective for the time being.

Rex Kerr
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  • Thanks Rex. I don't doubt its all neurobiological, but are tolerances primarily due to the strength of the input to the section of the brain that registers pain, or to how that portion of the brains responds to a given level of peripheral input? –  Nov 09 '13 at 01:12
  • @Eupraxis1981 - I'm not sure enough is known to answer your question beyond "it's both, definitely". – Rex Kerr Nov 12 '13 at 20:23