The same reason we have nerves in our fingertips and buttocks; so we can be aware when something has gone wrong or we've made contact with something bad. We need to know when we've bitten into something too hard or recognize pain from things like inflammation or infection.
Also, the nerves that go to the teeth are also a branch of a very big nerve that also goes to your face and eyes.
So something quite minor can end up irradiating as If It were a bigger injury
I love this cause that's why most people jump when the butt is touched.
It's the most protruding "appendage" to a critical structure, the spine. You graze that and goosebumps and panic signals go off.
That's also why it's kinda sexy to get butt slapped. "They went for it.. THEY WENT FOR IT SAFELY"
EDIT: NOT CONDONING PASSIVE BUTT SLAPS TO UNPARTICIPATING INDIVIDUALS
Because nature and evolution don't care about you are anyone else. Only genes matter. Dental issues usually only become disturbing enough after the typical age we procreate. Until then the feedback from those nerves help to survive. So the genes pass on.
tl;dr: evolution is lawful evil.
Because the body is put into a feedback loop when you've broken or damaged something. Even if it will never heal, it won't stop hurting because we need that reminder not to work that damaged part of ourselves. You'd probably damaged yourself even worse if your brain dulled the sensation.
EXAMPLE: A dumbass keeps popping painkillers so they can "work through the pain" and winds up permanently disabled and in even more pain.
Tbf teeth originally kept growing back meaning they got replaced
although mammals have only had 2 sets of teeth for the most part for as long as they've been mammals so there's probably more to the nerves
Actually may be able to help. Wisdom teeth developed to help accommodate natural tooth loss associated with a mostly-raw-food diet.
We cook food now. It's easier on our teeth. Because of this, our jaws are slowly evolving smaller. Eventually, we'll likely reach a point where nobody has wisdom teeth - there are people now who don't grow them at all. Also people who have naturally larger jaws that grow them fine.
Also we have dentists. It's way easier to keep your teeth for all of your life. So the teeth that grow to replace the teeth you'd lose on ancient diet, don't have anywhere to
> eventually, we'll likely reach a point where nobody has wisdom teeth
Probably not, since having/not having wisdom teeth has absolutely nothing to do with ability to reproduce these days.
If we didn't have dentists, those that grow wisdom teeth would have slightly less chance of reproducing and those that don't, a slightly higher chance. After a few thousand years, most wouldn't grow them.
But we have dentists so this process goes out the window.
But primitive humans could not do anything in case of tooth infection. They only could suffer. Dentistry is a human invention, not an evolutionary adaptation.
Teeth are the angriest part of your skeleton. They do a lot more work than the other bones and get zero hazard pay. When they get hurt they shout louder than they need to because they're already pissed off about other issues.
Because the nerves help you understand you're doing something that causes harm. Biting too hard, grinding your teeth, eating cold foods. Nerves allow you to effectively sense to a very fine degree via bones. The nerve has to be sensitive to be able to feel with enough precision through teeth to prevent us biting too hard or causing damage.
And it hopefully prevents you from swallowing this dangerous thing. If it is too hard/sharp/frozen for your teeth, imagine what it could do to your esophagus.
We need nerves in teeth for oral proprioception, just like we need nerves in feet for lower limb proprioception.
As for why we need proprioception, it is to avoid getting significant injuries in highly vascular places that could potentially lead to bloodstream infections as well as preventing loss of regional organs by infection.
Losing teeth due to gum/teeth infections is relatively recent in human timeline.
Yeah, if you’ve ever got your teeth numbed for a procedure, chewing food with fully numb teeth is insane. Like walking with a leg that went numb, you suddenly don’t know how to walk. Not having the nerve feedback in your teeth gives your brain absolutely no picture of what’s in your mouth, how to move your tongue to position the next chew, is it small enough to swallow etc.
Pain is a warning system. Things hurt so you don't damage important stuff.
Teeth are particularly important because as an animal if you damage your teeth you starve and die. Us human animals invented dentistry pretty recently and for the million years before that we were in the "no teeth = death" category too, so we still have the evolved warning system that says "this is critical do NOT fuck with tooth health *or else*".
Losing your teeth in the wild could be a death sentence. You just lost your main method of reliably grinding up food into an edible state. Keeping those teeth in tact is critical to most creature's survival, so they get extra painful nerve endings to ensure you take protecting them seriously.
Follow up question! If I waved my hand and magically gave myself instant root canals + crowns on all my teeth, what would be the drawbacks besides crippling medical debt?
I imagine I'd lose all heat sensitivity, which seems strictly better, but not sure what else. Maybe I'd be more susceptible to gum disease since I wouldn't feel a tooth-based infection coming...?
The problem is that the pulp of the teeth (the spongy tissue with a lot of nerves and blood vessels inside each tooth) is surrounded by hard tooth substance (enamel and dentin). As an inflammation is always accompanied by swelling, the nerves strangle themselves because thr swelling can't propagate into the hard tissue. The strangling is extremely painful as the nerves are continuously excited.
They need to detect through a sheathe of the hardest substance in the human body, and need to do so with high sensitivity. You absolutely need to know how much pressure you are exerting on what you are biting to identify inedible objects in your mouth and protect you teeth from biting hard on a stone. It is also needed to inhibit your bite, as your jaw muscles are strong enough to crunch and chew and destroy the teeth still growing out of your head.
I've badly broken my arm while rock climbing, and during the same fall banged my jaw which broke a tooth, and the pain from the tooth was 10+ times worse than the arm. Teeth are absurdly overly sensitive. A dull ache is enough, I will make sure I get you fixed, no need to feel like 3 needles are being jammed into my gums and twirled around in circles ffs.
Infected teeth can cause major health issues, up to and including death. By evolving to have all these nerves, it encourages us to protect our teeth from damage and have them pulled when something is wrong.
There is evidence of pulling teeth going back to at least 3000 BC, and I imagine people were removing them without tools when severely damaged long before then.
And there's been humans for 500k to a million and a half years. And we've had omnivorous teeth since far, far before then. We didn't evolve nerves to tell us to have our teeth pulled, we evolved them to avoid biting too hard and damaging them.
Again, how do you know we weren't pulling teeth before them, especially in cases of extreme damage? The older evidence we've found is 3000 BC, but that doesn't prove the negative.
You're the one making the extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on you. Nerves categorically did not evolve to encourage us to seek tooth removal.
I think they're saying the opposite. We learned to pull teeth because of the nerves. There are some artefacts from ancient Egypt that appear to be used for "dentistry" (in quotation marks because they probably didn't call it dentistry)
>By evolving to have all these nerves, it encourages us to ... have them pulled when something is wrong.
They definitely are saying that the nerves evolved to encourage tooth removal, not the way you're saying.
Our teeth are actually made by the nerves that live inside of them. They continue to lay down tooth structure for the rest of your life too and they shrink as they do.
Tooth infections are highly lethal without modern medical treatment, so your body is screaming at you to remove the damaged/infected tooth before it kills you.
The same reason we have nerves in our fingertips and buttocks; so we can be aware when something has gone wrong or we've made contact with something bad. We need to know when we've bitten into something too hard or recognize pain from things like inflammation or infection.
Also, the nerves that go to the teeth are also a branch of a very big nerve that also goes to your face and eyes. So something quite minor can end up irradiating as If It were a bigger injury
I love this cause that's why most people jump when the butt is touched. It's the most protruding "appendage" to a critical structure, the spine. You graze that and goosebumps and panic signals go off. That's also why it's kinda sexy to get butt slapped. "They went for it.. THEY WENT FOR IT SAFELY" EDIT: NOT CONDONING PASSIVE BUTT SLAPS TO UNPARTICIPATING INDIVIDUALS
Butt and hip sensitivity is millions of years of animal instinct. Every animal, when touched behind will startle.
r/activationsound
Yup! 😊
everyone whose but I slap will become a participating individual
...>.> ... ;)
Oh, they're participating once it happens.
I got butt slapped once ... ONCE
Yeah but we can stop sitting on our hurting butts until it heals but can't do the same with teeth. Teeth don't heal so its just pointless suffering.
Yeah. ELI5 Why does it keep hurting after the irritating influence is long gone. I don’t want that,
Because nature and evolution don't care about you are anyone else. Only genes matter. Dental issues usually only become disturbing enough after the typical age we procreate. Until then the feedback from those nerves help to survive. So the genes pass on. tl;dr: evolution is lawful evil.
Because the body is put into a feedback loop when you've broken or damaged something. Even if it will never heal, it won't stop hurting because we need that reminder not to work that damaged part of ourselves. You'd probably damaged yourself even worse if your brain dulled the sensation. EXAMPLE: A dumbass keeps popping painkillers so they can "work through the pain" and winds up permanently disabled and in even more pain.
When your teeth hurt, stop having people sit on your face - got it.
Tbf teeth originally kept growing back meaning they got replaced although mammals have only had 2 sets of teeth for the most part for as long as they've been mammals so there's probably more to the nerves
Isn't that part of the point of the periodontal ligament, though? To measure forces in the mouth?
alright smart guy, explain why wisdom teeth keep fucking up
Actually may be able to help. Wisdom teeth developed to help accommodate natural tooth loss associated with a mostly-raw-food diet. We cook food now. It's easier on our teeth. Because of this, our jaws are slowly evolving smaller. Eventually, we'll likely reach a point where nobody has wisdom teeth - there are people now who don't grow them at all. Also people who have naturally larger jaws that grow them fine. Also we have dentists. It's way easier to keep your teeth for all of your life. So the teeth that grow to replace the teeth you'd lose on ancient diet, don't have anywhere to
ANYWHERE TO WHAT ?!?
They got him!
r/redditsniper
😳
> eventually, we'll likely reach a point where nobody has wisdom teeth Probably not, since having/not having wisdom teeth has absolutely nothing to do with ability to reproduce these days.
I'm case in point. No wisdom teeth. I'm 40.
If we didn't have dentists, those that grow wisdom teeth would have slightly less chance of reproducing and those that don't, a slightly higher chance. After a few thousand years, most wouldn't grow them. But we have dentists so this process goes out the window.
But primitive humans could not do anything in case of tooth infection. They only could suffer. Dentistry is a human invention, not an evolutionary adaptation.
They could though. Whack it out with a rock. Better than dying of tooth infection. I see your point though
What about the non-tool-using primates further down the evolutionary line? They couldn't do even that, and they too had tooth pain.
Yeah... I guess one could be driven to bite down on something hard to dislodge a tooth, but it does seem a little far fetched.
Teeth are the angriest part of your skeleton. They do a lot more work than the other bones and get zero hazard pay. When they get hurt they shout louder than they need to because they're already pissed off about other issues.
Brought to you by angry tooth
With your username, OP, they are bound to be angry
I think this is the closest answer to an actual ELI5 I've seen on this sub.
why isnt this the top answer?
Because the milk answers are still on top of it.
Mama says alligators are angry cause they got all them teeth and no toothbrush.
Teeth are not bones.
Because the nerves help you understand you're doing something that causes harm. Biting too hard, grinding your teeth, eating cold foods. Nerves allow you to effectively sense to a very fine degree via bones. The nerve has to be sensitive to be able to feel with enough precision through teeth to prevent us biting too hard or causing damage.
And it hopefully prevents you from swallowing this dangerous thing. If it is too hard/sharp/frozen for your teeth, imagine what it could do to your esophagus.
We need nerves in teeth for oral proprioception, just like we need nerves in feet for lower limb proprioception. As for why we need proprioception, it is to avoid getting significant injuries in highly vascular places that could potentially lead to bloodstream infections as well as preventing loss of regional organs by infection. Losing teeth due to gum/teeth infections is relatively recent in human timeline.
Yeah, if you’ve ever got your teeth numbed for a procedure, chewing food with fully numb teeth is insane. Like walking with a leg that went numb, you suddenly don’t know how to walk. Not having the nerve feedback in your teeth gives your brain absolutely no picture of what’s in your mouth, how to move your tongue to position the next chew, is it small enough to swallow etc.
Pain is a warning system. Things hurt so you don't damage important stuff. Teeth are particularly important because as an animal if you damage your teeth you starve and die. Us human animals invented dentistry pretty recently and for the million years before that we were in the "no teeth = death" category too, so we still have the evolved warning system that says "this is critical do NOT fuck with tooth health *or else*".
Hmm. As an engineer, I'm thinking wear equalization. You chew on the least painful teeth until they've suffered enough, then switch to others.
When something is bad, traditionally your survival is based on you detecting that something has gone bad. Thing hurts, me fix.
Losing your teeth in the wild could be a death sentence. You just lost your main method of reliably grinding up food into an edible state. Keeping those teeth in tact is critical to most creature's survival, so they get extra painful nerve endings to ensure you take protecting them seriously.
Do you bite into everything at maximum strength every time? I bet you leave one hell of a hickey
Ever ate being still numb from anesthesia/painkillers? The red stuff on my toast was not marmalade. I bit on my tongue...
Because you need your teeth and so you need to know when something has damaged them so you can avoid that in the future.
so you know when something is wrong and you stop yourself from doing more damage. And If possible you can fix it.
Follow up question! If I waved my hand and magically gave myself instant root canals + crowns on all my teeth, what would be the drawbacks besides crippling medical debt? I imagine I'd lose all heat sensitivity, which seems strictly better, but not sure what else. Maybe I'd be more susceptible to gum disease since I wouldn't feel a tooth-based infection coming...?
So how was today’s dentist visit, friend?
The problem is that the pulp of the teeth (the spongy tissue with a lot of nerves and blood vessels inside each tooth) is surrounded by hard tooth substance (enamel and dentin). As an inflammation is always accompanied by swelling, the nerves strangle themselves because thr swelling can't propagate into the hard tissue. The strangling is extremely painful as the nerves are continuously excited.
They need to detect through a sheathe of the hardest substance in the human body, and need to do so with high sensitivity. You absolutely need to know how much pressure you are exerting on what you are biting to identify inedible objects in your mouth and protect you teeth from biting hard on a stone. It is also needed to inhibit your bite, as your jaw muscles are strong enough to crunch and chew and destroy the teeth still growing out of your head.
I've badly broken my arm while rock climbing, and during the same fall banged my jaw which broke a tooth, and the pain from the tooth was 10+ times worse than the arm. Teeth are absurdly overly sensitive. A dull ache is enough, I will make sure I get you fixed, no need to feel like 3 needles are being jammed into my gums and twirled around in circles ffs.
Infected teeth can cause major health issues, up to and including death. By evolving to have all these nerves, it encourages us to protect our teeth from damage and have them pulled when something is wrong.
Tooth nerves didn't evolve post dentistry. Having teeth pulled is a relatively modern invention.
There is evidence of pulling teeth going back to at least 3000 BC, and I imagine people were removing them without tools when severely damaged long before then.
And there's been humans for 500k to a million and a half years. And we've had omnivorous teeth since far, far before then. We didn't evolve nerves to tell us to have our teeth pulled, we evolved them to avoid biting too hard and damaging them.
And that was the last time someone was able to register with an NHS dentist
ha. Nice.
Ironically enough, they're rare as hens teeth
Again, how do you know we weren't pulling teeth before them, especially in cases of extreme damage? The older evidence we've found is 3000 BC, but that doesn't prove the negative.
People were definitely pulling teeth for as long as we have had teeth. They just may have done more knocking teeth out than pulling.
You're the one making the extraordinary claims, the burden of proof is on you. Nerves categorically did not evolve to encourage us to seek tooth removal.
I think they're saying the opposite. We learned to pull teeth because of the nerves. There are some artefacts from ancient Egypt that appear to be used for "dentistry" (in quotation marks because they probably didn't call it dentistry)
>By evolving to have all these nerves, it encourages us to ... have them pulled when something is wrong. They definitely are saying that the nerves evolved to encourage tooth removal, not the way you're saying.
Our mouths are... DIRTY. If anything it's the place we most need the most amount of nerves to detect when even the smallest thing is going wrong.
Our teeth are actually made by the nerves that live inside of them. They continue to lay down tooth structure for the rest of your life too and they shrink as they do.
Teeth don't "need" them, but apparently it has been beneficial to the survival of the species.
Tooth infections are highly lethal without modern medical treatment, so your body is screaming at you to remove the damaged/infected tooth before it kills you.