I Can Feel You

by Dianne Cuyugan

Have you seen the movie series Saw and Final Destination? Did you like it or did you hate it? How do you feel seeing someone’s neck as being sliced by a chain saw? A head crushed by boulders or metals? A whole body trapped in a big aquarium filled with ice? How about skin drenched in muriatic acid? Fingers chopped one by one? Nails slowly pulled upward until they separate with the skin? Blood oozing from the eyes? Body skinned alive? Inscribing words on the stomach with a knife?

They were pretty gory, right? While watching those movies, how did you react? Have you noticed yourself covering your vision in one way or another? Squinting your eyes? Touching your body parts feeling and checking if they are still intact and unstained by blood? Although you already expect some scenes to be like these because of prior knowledge, you can’t help but to be surprised, afraid and also threatened. We are threatened because we fear for our own self being in those situations. Unconsciously we imagine and we empathize. Resulting in our empathy is feeling the same pain inflicted on the victims of the actions.

Pain sensations are induced just by observing and watching someone being injured and tortured (Osborn & Derbyshire, 2010). We can feel their agony and pain to the point that it seems that someone’s actually pricking our eyes, stabbing our hands, slicing our stomach. We feel the sensations of the sharp knife against our skin, and also the rough edges of a chain saw. The felt pain does not have limits with the intensities. Aside from the extremes, we can also feel the sharp and tingling sensation of a paper cut, the hot and burning sensation of bathing your wound with alcohol, and etc. These happen because watching someone in pain activates the pain matrix of our brain. The ACC and insula were the most activated structures while watching someone injured. Thus, although we are not actually the one being physically injured and tortured, we can still feel the pain as if it is really happening to us.

So if this is the case? Why do we still watch them? Do these suggest people who watch these stuffs tend to be masochist?

Osborn, J. & Derbyshire, S. (2010). Pain sensation evoked by observing injury in others. PAIN 148, 268–274