Science Proves That Life Is One Big Action Movie

You're going to hurt one day. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but no one gets out of life unscathed, and eventually you're going to feel some pain. Are you stressed out now? I am too. But that's okay. In fact, it's downright normal: new research suggests that the fear of pain is actually worse than the pain itself.

A paper published today in PLOS Computational Biology finds that humans' normal decision making processes go haywire when pain is involved. Normally, we want to push punishment off into the future and receive rewards as soon as possible. Life is uncertain, so if we wait for the bad, maybe it'll go away. Of course, if we wait for the good, maybe it'll go away too.

But when it comes to pain, the authors write, "people seem to prefer to expedite punishment, implying that its anticipation carries a cost, often conceptualized as ‘dread.'" They offer a straightforward example: "When faced with the choice of whether to have a painful medical or dental procedure right now or in the future, many people opt to ‘get it out of the way now,'" they write.

To study this, the researchers had to inflict pain on their study subjects, which they chose to do in the form of electric shocks. After excluding people that didn't feel the pain, as well as people who wanted pain as soon as possible regardless of how powerful the shock was (the researchers refer to them as "maximum dreaders," which is a stunning band name), they were left with a reasonable pool of 33 people who don't like pain.

After shocking them all, 26 "exhibited dread for pain." In other words, "these participants preferred to experience the same pain sooner rather than later and were willing to accept more pain in order to hasten its occurrence." The why is unclear. The authors posit that "one possibility is that cognitive and emotional mechanisms associated with preparation for pain interfere with other behavioral processes, such as those involved in reward seeking." It's a fascinating argument, one which you can read in full in the open-source paper.

But let's now talk for a minute about how unbelievably badass this paper is. I dareyou to find a tougher equation than this one:

That little gem has me thinking: Where have we heard about the fear of pain before? Oh yeah, every action movie ever made. The emotional interplay between pain and the anticipation of pain is at the heart of all muscle-filled blockbusters, and as it turns out, it exists in real life too. There you have it folks: At our core, we're little more than walking blobs built around a core of justice and unlimited ammo.

To celebrate science finding that this is an essential part of the human condition—which I'm now going to call the Schwarzenegger Effect, join me if you like—here are the best UDREAD+UPAIN moments in action history:

The quintessential pain dread moment. See how Arnold toys with a very energized David Patrick Kelly. Then see how he drops him.

Heroes can feel the dread too. Look at how sketched out Bruce Lee is during the mirror part, where Bear Claw McGraw could pop out at any moment. Then he gets over it and kills him.

Classic moment at the end of this clip where Hans, the generic bad guy, does what every bad guy does wrong: Relishes in the kill. It's meant to be a power move based on the Schwarzenegger Effect: If you kill someone right away, it's not as satisfying as watching him dread that death. But Bruce Willis isn't fucking stupid, despite what Hans may have thought.

Classic turning point in Face/Off. They know that, by wearing each other's face, they're in for a long, sad road. So why not rip the band-aid and end it now?

Ever Bond movie comes down to the interrogation scene, and this one is undeniably the best. It's not the pain of an industrial laser cutting you in half that makes you break, it's the fear. What an extraordinary light.

@derektmead