PAIN IS SLOWER THAN LIGHT --> REALLY!

SPEED OF PAIN

The graph to the right is a picture of the speed of pain.  Now you're asking yourselves, "What is Puttss throwing this out here for?"  Easy.  Did you forget that the title of this blog is "365 Thoughts Emanating from Paul Dion, STL?"  This is stuff I think about, and have been thinking about for a longer time than some of you have been alive.  The most interesting course I ever took in school was one entitled Physiological Psychology.  I learned more life enhancing information in that class than in just about any other one outside of one or two of the Theological classes I suffered through.  This one was revealing things to me that I would perhaps never have learned on my own.  It was delivered by a teacher who cared about us and who cared a lot about the subject matter.  It was all about the functions of the human body, from head to toe and from inside out.  The point of the class was that the observable material activities of our bodies impact the more spiritual parts of our being in ways that we are discovering every day.  Needless to say, this was a very demanding subject and one that nurses and doctors must be required to study early on in their preparation for the calling that they have chosen.  I have to say that knowing these things has made a different person of me, not that anyone can readily see, of course.  These are the deeper moments of this little outing.  The one passing thought that caused these deeper considerations, sometimes called excogitations by people who like the $25.00 words.  (Even the computer thinks I'm snooty, it's telling me that there is no such word.)  Shut up, Machine!
So back to the speed of pain.  I went to the dentist and I remembered the teacher saying that sensations travel in our nerves at a measurable rate of speed. He told us what it is but I forgot it. It was something like between 1 to 220 millimeters per millisecond, or something like that.  Actually it was not the pain thing that brought the thought to mind, it was the delay that was taking place during an interview over satellite and on television, between a person in North America and one in the Middle East.  Now I thought  that I remembered that electrons travel at almost the speed of light, and yet we experience a delay when we cause that to travel ungodly distances from earth to a satellite and back to earth 18,000 land miles away.  What a trip to complete in about 2 or 3 seconds.
I looked it up, and I was right.  Now the interesting thing about it is that sensations that are caused by a bunch of stimuli in our bodies travel at a snail's pace in comparison.  
I got my first lesson about that when one time I touched a hot water pipe in the cellar of our home and I remember that for a small fraction of a second, it felt like it was cold.  It quickly turned to hot and I got burned, but in fact my brain had fooled me in the first nanosecond of the experience.  My neurons weren't firing fast enough through the synapses.


So see, my brain has no rhyme nor reason.  It reaches out and makes really off-the-wall relationships.  You're not going to believe this (maybe you will, after this), but tomorrow will be weird too.  But it won't be about pain.  Pain is not silly.  Tomorrow is borderline silly.  It's about stuff that we were taught in school and made to memorize because it was said to be of great importance.  65 years later, I'll give you my opinion of that, tomorrow.