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Originally Posted by Superman
The reason I will not walk to the edge of a tall building is because I am afraid I will jump. It's not that I want to kill myself. The reason I feel like jumping is hard to explain. I see the opportunity.
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You have a monkey jumping brain.
Impulse to Jump Off Heights? - SciForums.com
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I was wondering if anybody has had a frightful impulse to jump off something while you were fairly high up in the air. I've encountered this phenomena many times and so have my friends, but it is difficult to explain the concept in any search engine and come up with adequate references. Does anybody know what I'm talking about?
-Evan.
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Intrusive thoughts?
Impulse to Jump Off Heights? - SciForums.com
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There's at least one interesting theory about this:
The human brain is an overlay of recent (last few million years) capacities and capabilities on top of the old, ancestral mammal brain.
That old brain dates back to when we were monkeys in trees. We were small, with grasping feet and excellent agility. We had balancing tails. We could leap through twenty vertical feet of air and catch a branch with one foot, easily. We did it for play. We lived in these trees, high off the ground, in safety.
The adaptations to our present weight and grounded physiology came later. They are instinctive, but they are overlaid on the older reflexes.
So what we experience is a conversation between two parts of our brain. The one is saying "Whee ! last one to the girder down there is a rotten egg". The other is saying " Aagh ! don't ! you'll kill us all, what are you crazy ?"
I like the theory. No evidence for it, though.
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Interesting thread in that Sci_Fi forum, in the end I would not worry about it.
If you feel this need to purge these feelings from your system, you may want to take up skydiving.
