In the next few paragraphs I am going to be answering one of the greatest questions ever known to mankind - Why is it that paper cuts hurt more than pretty much anything else?
Lets start off by thinking about pain. What is the point of it? Surely we would all be better off without this unpleasant sensation? Well this isn't actually the case - as nasty as it is; pain is on the whole a really good thing. It is our body's way of forcing us away from danger and making us rest until any injury or illness has had a chance to heal. Evolution has kept selecting for our ability to feel pain as those who can't experience it are more likely to get themselves killed before they can reproduce and their genes get wiped out of the gene pool.
The major importance of pain to our bodies is illustrated if we think about the millions of touch receptors in our skin. In every square centimeter there is 1 receptor for warmth, 6 for cold, 15 for pressure and a huge 200 for pain. Pain is felt when these pain receptors are stimulated and the nerves send a message at around 180 miles per hour to the brain that tells us we are hurting.
Now the problem with paper cuts is that they usually occur on our hands, and hands just happen to have more nerve endings than any part of the body. Our palms, lips, nipples and genitals, are areas particularly sensitive to touch, and therefore also to paper cuts, due to the presence of a particular type of touch receptor in these areas that responds to light touching.
A paper cut is generally not a serious injury despite how it feels, and only irritates the nerve endings in our hands rather than destroying them like a really bad injury would. This unfortunately means all the nerves work just fine as they send their message to the brain. In the case of a serious injury, it might not hurt too much to start with as the damaged nerves have to repair them before they can contact the brain.
What else? Well, paper cuts aren't the same as razor cuts - the edge of the paper is pretty blunt and serrated so it rips and tears our flesh leaving little bits of paper in the wound. Our body doesn't like it much when foreign objects end up imbedded in our skin and it tells us about it by making it hurt.
So, knowing all of this, I'm afraid isn't going to make a paper cut hurt any less but at least you know what is causing all the pain now. If it all gets too much you can always try hitting the cut with a hammer to destroy some of the nerve endings and maybe it will hurt a bit less.
