If there is one aspect of the manifold manifestations of the mind that seems to directly fly in the face of all logic and sense to the average person, it is the existence of masochism.

It would seem that the most basic rule of behaviour in all creatures, from humans all the way down to the lowly amoeba, is that we avoid pain and seek pleasure. Even plants, in their slow and simple way, react to some stimuli by trying to avoid it. So what on Earth went wrong to make some people seek what most people would clearly understand to be painful stimuli?

There are a lot of potential answers to that question, and for different human subjects the answer might vary quite wildly, but on a purely physiological level, it makes more sense than you might think.

In order to reach the answer, however, we first need to understand the nature of physical pain as it is experienced by the human body.

Any painful stimulus causes your body to release some fairly potent internally generated chemicals called endorphins. They are powerful painkillers, and your body is assuming that the pain your are feeling is as a result of real damage being done to the body by a danger which might very well be happening and you can’t afford to be debilitated by pain, so it sends these painkillers into action to delay the pain and let you deal with the danger before the pain gets to you.

And your body is not too fussy about the dosage. It pretty much dumps whatever endorphins it has on hand in only vaguely proportionate amounts relative to the pain, and tends to assume “better too much than too little”. And as many an addict can tell you, if the amount of painkiller exceeds the amount of pain, the result is a very unique and powerful kind of pleasure.

This system works quite well for the rest of the animal kingdom, and for the most part, works quite well for us human beings as well. Even masochists mostly avoid pain and seek pleasure. It is just that the pleasure they seek is that wonderful endorphin rush mentioned above.

This is aided by a simple fact of physiology : pain is a product of nerve trauma, and hence, it gets to our brain immediately via our lightning fast nervous system. And if the stimulus is brief, so is the sensation of pain. But the endorphin response is a product of our much slower and less finely tuned endocrine system, which is chemical and not electrical, and hence comes sufficiently after the pain for our minds to separate the two sensations and treat them differently.

Add to that the fact that we tend to remember the last part of an experience more strongly than the first, and the masochistic pattern begins to emerge. If the pain is brief and first, and the pleasure is long and second, it is quite possible for the human mind to fixate on that pleasure and develop a preference for what seems, on the surface, to be a painful stimuli.

The stimuli is indeed painful, otherwise the endorphins would not be released. But the response is pleasure. It’s all a matter of how your particular brain sorts and interprets the sensation.

And with repeated painful stimuli that are briefer than the pleasure of the endorphin response, the excess builds in the bloodstream and creates a state of mind almost exactly like the haze created by the abuse of various narcotics, and all from one’s own perfectly natural body chemicals. Legal too!

This neatly, if subtly, dodges the logical absurdity inherent in the idea of someone who “likes pain”. In a common sense manner, that just makes no sense. If you like it, it’s not pain, right?

Well, yes and no. The masochist does indeed seek painful stimuli, which seems entirely illogical. But it is not the pain that they like. It’s the pleasure that the pain releases.

In fact, in theory, if the painful stimuli was extremely brief but extremely strong, it would come and go so fast that your conscious mind would barely register it, yet you would still reap the substantial endorphin rewards. All the pleasure with (almost) none of the pain.

In summation, while masochism seems to fly in the face of the most basic rule of animal behaviour – seek pleasure and avoid pain – it is really entirely consistent with it.

It’s just that the pleasure sought is initiated by pain.