I was thinking about my recent post comparing hunger and pain and realized it was profound enough to warrant further investigation.

Let’s back up a bit. I’ve commented in the past that there’s a meme going around in society, especially popular amongst hippies and assorted filth, that you should “listen to your body.” This basically means your body will tell you when you’re doing things that are good for it, and also when you’re doing things that are bad for it.

Now, as I’ve also mentioned before, I’ve read a lot of arguments in regards to pain that go against this “listen to your body” argument. They basically state that some pain is basically psychosomatic, and not really indicative of serious structural damage to the body. It’s a little hard to wrap your brain around this, however. Obviously, if we slam our finger in a car door (e.g. cause structural damage) we feel pain, so we’ve been trained to associate pain with structural damage. Why would our body “lie” to us and cause pain when there is no (serious) corresponding damage.

This gets to the point of my earlier post — hunger is an example of our body lying to us. It says, “eat, eat, eat,” when in fact we’ve satiated ourselves. As a result, you see a lot of fatties walking around (well, not walking so much as waddling) doomed to early death from heart disease or diabetes. If our body is supposed to be sending signals that encourage the survival of the organism, it’s massively failing by saying “eat, eat, eat.”

But here’s the twist. For most of our evolutionary history, the message “eat, eat, eat” made sense because most creatures don’t have regular access to McDonald’s and frozen dinners. If you’re a Neanderthal, and you stumble across a meal, you better eat as much as possible, storing whatever you don’t immediately turn into energy as fat, because you don’t know when your next meal is coming. So this hunger incentive delivered to your brain really is the “right” message for most creatures, during most periods of history and in most environments. (You could argue it’s the wrong message for pets, since they likely will be fed on a regular schedule.)

Could the same thing be said about pain? Is our body programmed to deliver messages of pain according to rules that made sense out in the wild, but no longer makes sense in structured, civilized, 40 hours a week society? I don’t know, of course, but it’s an interesting thought.

And to expand upon that, is it possible that we’re constantly receiving “incorrect” signals from our body and senses because they are programmed according to rules that no longer apply — rules that made sense when we were monkeys, but do not as men? You could argue this is what anxiety or panic over nonthreatening situations is, or feelings of attraction to someone merely because they’re wearing red lipstick, or a perfume that somehow indicates desirability (on some chemical, pheromone related level I don’t understand.) Perhaps we’re going through life like blind fools, feebleminded Mr. Magoos, knocking over ceramic furniture with our canes, oblivious to the damage we are causing to ourselves and others.