“I like being spanked. Getting tied up is fun.” Rihanna, the famous pop singer, confessed in 2011 to Rolling Stone magazine that she believed she was a bit of a masochist. However, these statements today no longer impact as much as those of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch did in 1780 in his work “The Venus of the Skins.”
It seems natural to us that human beings try to avoid all those stimuli that cause them discomfort, and among them we tend to think that pain is one of the most important, since we normally associate it with suffering. However, there are those who speak of ‘low intensity’ masochism: we all know someone who loves food so spicy that it makes their tongue go numb, we all have a friend who runs exhausting marathons, and many of us have scratched some once a mosquito bite until our skin lifts or leaves it red. Why?
The relationships between pleasure and pain are more complex than we might believe. In understanding this extraordinary relationship, a key may be in the substances that the brain produces when we feel pain. These are endorphins, natural opiates that our nervous system uses to counteract pain and fear. Another factor that has been proposed is the relief felt after escaping or overcoming an unpleasant situation, as happens in people who self-harm , generally to alleviate psychological suffering. But the case of masochism is different, since pain is perceived as pleasant in itself, although there are those who have argued that the true objective of masochism is related more to power and submission than to the pain itself.
In an interesting study carried out by the University of Dusseldorf, a group of people with masochistic behaviors was compared, among others, with a control group that did not show this type of behavior. To begin with, they found that the masochistic-prone group exhibited a higher pain threshold and rated the laser stimulation applied to them as significantly more pleasant compared to the controls. And even more interestingly, using the magnetoencephalography technique, they observed that, after a first painless tactile stimulation, the application of the laser caused a greater amplitude in the late response of the primary somatosensory area (S1) of the brain. The authors proposed as a tentative explanation the possibility that people with masochistic behaviors suffer an alteration in the modulation of somatosensory information processing. Thus, stimuli such as pain, which in most people increase activation, would be perceived as ‘normal’ by those with masochistic behaviors.
The interest and acceptance of masochism and sadism have grown in society, which has even withdrawn them from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But on a scientific level there is still much to know about these paraphilias. Psychology and neuroscience want to understand and not judge those who enjoy feeling pain. As they say, “in variety is taste.”
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
The importance of context has been clearly exposed in recent work by Leknes and his team of collaborators from the Universities of Oxford and Oslo. This group of researchers has shown that the brain behaves differently when the same pain of moderate intensity is compared with a pain ‘worse’ or a ‘better’. The participants interpreted this moderate pain as pleasant when compared to a more intense one. At the brain level, less activity was observed in the insula and anterior cingulate, and greater activation in the reward circuit that includes the orbital and ventromedial prefrontal cortices.
