I sincerely doubt it.
OK: your primary sense organ is your brain. So there’s a difference between not feeling pain, and not registering it. And there are different ways of stopping the feeling of pain.
“The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.”
If you’re getting a medical procedure, they can apply a local anaesthetic, which stops the local nerves from detecting pain (or touch, or temperature). You could get a spinal block, which doesn’t stop the local nerves from feeling pain, but stops any of those sensations from being received by the brain. You could get a general anaesthetic, which doesn’t stop the sensation at all, but makes it so that your consciousness is switched off and doesn’t register it, and then there’s something like Ketamine, where (I’m told) you can feel the pain, but it’s dissociated and somehow not relevant, and thus ignorable. I’ve heard it described as that the pain is happening, but it’s happening somewhere else to someone else and you can just sort of watch it from a distance.
There are also different types of sensation. We all think of touch as just “touch”, but there are specific nerves for pain. There are different nerves for temperature. There are nerves for pressure. There are nerves in the gut that tell us when we’re hungry, and others that tell us when our bladder or colon are full. And there are brain structures that put these sensations together and interpret them all. The feeling of hunger is called enteroception, for example. A general sense of what’s happening inside your body is interoception. The sense of where your body is in relation to itself and the world is proprioception (what enables you to juggle, or close your eyes and touch the tip of your nose). Balance is a sense: the sense of where liquid is in a part of your inner ear. And these senses can be individually blocked, confused, or of varying sensitivity. It’s quite common for autists, for example, to have bad proprioception and/or interoception. Which is to say: we’re typically clumsy, and we don’t always know whether we’re hungry or not.
So now the question: where is the analgesia happening?
We know where it’s happening in Hanson’s disease. It’s progressive peripheral nerve damage. That’s fairly well understood.
We’re less certain where it’s happening in the “congenital analgesia” condition. From what I understand, their sense of touch is just fine, but they just don’t get any sensation of pain. The descriptions say that they have to smell scorching to know if they’ve been burned, but doesn’t mention whether they can feel hot and cold. It might be that they just don’t have pain sensors, or that the part of the brain that registers pain as pain isn’t working. (Which is a fairly remarkable thing to not work: arguably, starfish can feel something we can interpret as pain. The sensation of pain is probably, in terms of evolution, older than breathing, or a heart, or even a brain.)
There’s a different congenital condition which turns off the sense of satiety: people with that condition always feel like they’re starving to death. Even people who are starving to death don’t feel like they’re starving to death. Often enough, the feeling of hunger itself fades. But people with this condition always feel starving, and unless they’re prevented from it, will eat themselves to death.
What we don’t know is where it’s happening in this condition. Is that she can’t feel pain, or that, I don’t know, the gain settings are inverse log rather than linear, or linear rather than log: low levels of pain feel similar, but when the pain impetus increases, the sensation of it increases more slowly for her than for most people? Is there a cut off: nothing above a certain level is registered? Is it that the sensation in terms of nerve signals is just the same, but her brain interprets it differently, it’s not experienced in the same way as it is for most people?
That’s where the neuroscientists get involved. Most of us (myself included especially) aren’t even qualified to know what the questions are.
