FISH MAY ACTUALLY FEEL PAIN, AFTER ALL
The parts of the human brain that process the unpleasant pain have no equivalent in the brain of fish. So, does that mean fish are not able to feel pain? Not necessarily according to a new paper. This is a debate with a long history one that shows no signs of being drawn to a conclusion anything soon but this new paper points to modern neuroscience research that pain effect and awareness can still be present in humans even when pain processing regions of the brain are injured.
In other words, if human brains can adapt to do without the part of the neural pain chain, then maybe fish don't need all of their links either. ''While our study cannot prove that fish feel pain, we can assert that arguments relying on a lack of certain brain structures to deny fish pain in fish look increasingly attend able'', says Kenneth Williford, a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Arlington. The team used several cases of brain injury in humans to strengthen their argument, including with one patient called Roger.
While a key pain processing part of Roger's brain had been destroyed by disease, he was even more sensitive to pain than the average person. Fish can't use language to tell us. Whether they are suffering, and they don't give an awful lot away in their expressions, either. However, they do have plenty of the necessary systems in place including pain receptors.
The topic ties into a philosophy called Neo--Cartesianism, a school of thought that argues any suffering we might see in an animal is only apparent and can't be connected with mental anguish, at least not in the human sense.
A study from earlier this year was the first to find strong evidence of invertebrates feeling pain in a similar way to mammals. ''That many animals consciously suffer negative pain effect remains well supported by a general analogy argument and, in turn, this provides a parsimonious explanation of may animal behaviors'', write the researchers in their paper.
