It seems bizarre to seek out experiences that are uncomfortable or downright painful. Yet examples abound: it’s common to eat painfully hot chillies, drink bitter coffee, or ‘feel the burn' when exercising - and enjoy it. CrowdScience listener Sandy is baffled by this seemingly counterintuitive phenomenon, and has asked us to investigate. Presenter Anand Jagatia turns guinea pig as he tests a variety of unpleasant sensations, and unpicks the reasons we’re sometimes attracted to them. He meets chilli-eating champion Shahina Waseem, who puts Anand’s own attraction to spicy food to the test. Food scientist John Hayes explains how our taste receptors work and why our genes affect the appeal of bitter food. Neuroscientist Soo Ahn Lee describes her research looking at what happens in participants’ brains when they eat chocolate and capsaicin, the chemical that makes chillies hot. As for the ‘pleasurable pain’ we sometimes experience when exercising, sports doctor Robin Chatterjee reveals the secrets of the ‘runner’s high’, while neuroscientist Siri Leknes explains why the feeling that something’s good for us can make discomfort pleasurable. Presenter: Anand Jagatia Producer: Jo Glanville Editor: Cathy Edwards Production co-ordinator: Ishmael Soriano Sound engineer: Sue Maillot (Image: Young man have bath in ice covered lake in nature and looking up, Czech Republic Credit: CharlieChesvick via Getty Images)
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I've only actually done like the proper ice bathing once and I was like, whoa, this is intensely painful.
We've got quite the sauna culture and I have to say, plunging into, you know, freezing water when you're really hot is both pleasurable and painful.
Sometimes when I get really super stressed, I sometimes enjoy eating really spicy foods.
My tongue is like literally burning.
Yeah, I'm kind of like feeling, I feel that kind of strong experiences of the spiciness kind of relieve my stress or probably pain can cure another pain.
At the moment I have a bilateral tennis elbow and an Achilles tendonitis.
The reason being I've got a one year old, so I'm now lifting this relatively heavy one year old kid all the time.
So even though I'm in pain, I still do it because of the enjoyment or pleasure I get from seeing my 1 year old, his smile and giggles that exceeds the pain that I'm experiencing from the tendonitis.
Pain is normally best avoided, but sometimes we can't escape it and sometimes, as we just heard, we deliberately seek it out.
Why is that?
Hi, I'm Anand Jagatiya and in this episode of Crowd Science from the BBC World Service, we're exploring the fine line between pleasure and pain because of a question from listener Sandy.
Hi, my name is Sandy and I live in Dubai.
My question to Crowd Science is why is it that certain unpleasant sensations and pain feel good?
And what happens in the human mind when those sensations cross over from becoming something negative to something positive and even desirable?
Nice.
So basically the nub of it is why do we sometimes seem to enjoy or get pleasure from things which are normally, I guess, unpleasant or painful?
Absolutely, yeah, 100%.
And be that in all our senses, you know, I mean, whether it's like watching a horror movie or a gore film or, you know, eating super spicy food or smelling some kind of skanky perfume or just being at the gym and hurting like hell, you know, these are all things that are technically supposed to be natural negative, but we sometimes find a lot of pleasure from it.