Imagine for a second you were transposed into the karmic driven world of Earl. You drive at night on a two-lane road with a separation fence in the center. Your mood is normal, nothing special has happened, but suddenly you feel a kind of urge to collide with the separation wall. You’re scared. Why collide? You do not usually have suicidal thoughts, on the contrary, you really want to get home safely. The rest of the way you will already be vigilant, for fear that you will not intentionally make a wrong move on purpose.
Half of the readers must be nodding in sympathy now. The rest may think I was crazy, but in 2012 the first article was published describing a similar phenomenon. A group of researchers led by Dr. Jennifer Heimes of the University of Florida (now the University of Notre Dame, Illinois) described the “high places phenomenon.”
The researchers who signed the article all came from the field of suicide research. They reported people coming to their clinic and describing a situation where they were standing in a high place, for example at the edge of a cliff, and felt an urge to jump out of it. This urge confused them. They did not think they were suicidal, and usually were not depressed, but the desire to jump made them think that maybe something was wrong with them after all.
Haymes and her teammates decided to check out what was going on here. They interviewed 431 students and asked them to tell how many times in the past they have experienced suicidal thoughts, anxiety, depression or an urge to jump from a high place. As expected, people with suicidal tendencies reported a desire to jump, but there were also many who reported this urge with no suicidal background.
“The phenomenon of high places is experienced by people with suicidal tendencies and also by people without suicidal tendencies, equally,” the researchers wrote. “We estimate that there are two different phenomena here. In people who experience this urge and are not prone to suicide at all, the urge to jump probably reflects their sensitivity to internal warning signs, and actually indicates their desire to protect themselves.”
Haymes’ hypothesis was that there was some confusion here in the interpretation of the signs that the body transmits. As we sometimes smile and then feel happier or more confident in ourselves, forgetting that we are the ones who decided to smile in the first place. As we approach the edge of the cliff, the body tenses up, there is a change in muscle stiffness and blood flow and the brain may mistakenly interpret them as preparing for a jump instead of trying to avoid it.
“Researchers miss something”
Other researchers have suggested different hypotheses. Because Haymes described the phenomenon as characteristic of high places, some interpreted it as an optical illusion: because the gaze suddenly has nothing to hold on to, we feel as if we have already jumped off the cliff and interpret this feeling as if the void attracts us. However, the appearance of the same urge to do something that will lead to real damage even in situations that are not related to height indicates that this is not the whole story.
The article by Haymes and her associates has been cited in scientific journals only ten times, “but tens of thousands of entries have been made and shared on Twitter 1,200 times,” Dr. Tobias Teisman of Rohr Bochum University in Germany told Globes. In two groups of German subjects. “I really do not understand the difference between the level of interest in this subject in the public and the low level of interest in it in research. I think we are missing something. “
Dr. Tobias Teisman / Photo: Private photo
Indeed, in popular culture this issue appears quite a bit. In recent years he has devoted several magazine articles to the world press. Jean-Paul Sartre called it “L’appel du vide in French,” Call of the Void in English, and discussed it in his book “There Is and There Is Not.” He argued that this is an attempt by our mind to present our freedom of choice. We constantly remind ourselves that we can die, but choose not to. The simpler and more conscious the possibility of choosing death, the more powerful our freedom of choice is experienced.
The places where the phenomenon is revealed in all its glory are Reddit or Twitter threads. There almost every mention of the phenomenon elicits thousands of reactions. In these threads it turns out that “reading the void” can be very varied. Each person adds to it their own unique characteristic – jumping off a cliff, colliding with a separation fence or with vehicles coming from the opposite direction are the most common impulses. Others experience an urge or apprehension to stop the motorcycle with a fatal brake squeak in the middle of the ride, knock one of the children off the porch, crush the baby or throw the cellphone from a high place.
And we will emphasize again, this is not a real desire to throw the cell phone from a high place – it also probably exists and is even completely understood, but the commenters in these threads talk about an urge involved in immense anxiety about the possibility that it will happen, as if the urge and anxiety are one. Same goes for the baby: Some people feel the urge to crush the baby out of distress or frustration, and this is even quite normal as long as it is clear to everyone that there is no intention to do it. But the reference in our case is to a situation where the urge to crush seems to stem from the fear of crushing, from the desire to protect. As if they are a mirror image of each other but coexist.
“No one tried to commit suicide because of the empty call”
Like the content of thought, the emotions it evokes vary from person to person. Some immediately recognize it as a kind of warning call under the guise of impulse, just as Hames claimed. Others, like those who came to her clinic in panic, fear that perhaps it really implies an urge to hurt themselves or others, and they are troubled by the possibility that they may one day succumb to the urge. You can see the variety of writers’ reactions to the phenomenon: “It really happens to me all the time and it was scary at first. I got over it by reminding myself that these are just thoughts and not who I am or what I want,” wrote one user. “I’m always scared, what if I really did. I’m crazy about it,” another wrote. Another surfer wrote: “It does not scare me. It is a survival instinct. If I walk up stairs and think ‘what if I threw the baby on the stairs’, then it only makes me hold the baby tighter to make sure it does not happen. Like the brain does on Itself a reverse psychology. ” And one more concluded: “Okay, but can you please learn how to make it stop?”.
Can anyone really succumb to a push and jump?
Teisman: “We have not researched the phenomenon in depth, to the level that we can say it has never happened to any person. But we see that these are people who have no intention or desire to die, and when the urge appears they do not act in his direction, on the contrary, move away from the cliff. , Concentrate on driving, put the cellphone in the bag.
“When talking to people after a suicide attempt, most of them say they planned it for a long time. A significant minority, 25%, say that only five minutes have passed from the decision to the execution, which means there is a sudden suicidal urge in the world that leads to action. “They thought they wanted to die long before the act. I never saw anyone who did not want to die and suddenly tried to commit suicide out of impulse.”
What happens if we encounter a cliff in virtual reality? Can we feel the urge to jump even though we know we are safe? And what happens if we ‘really’ jump into virtual reality? Will this urge worsen or weaken the next time we encounter a real cliff?
“These are good research questions, but I have not seen such studies yet.”
Bad thoughts that are completely normal
Perhaps the reason why the study is not so interested in this story is that in fact it has already been somewhat resolved, under the heading of “troublesome thoughts.” For example, a constant crippling fear of having an accident, repeated projections of a possible “movie” in the head – these are the kinds of annoying thoughts associated with driving on the road, which appear in many people while driving or driving a car. Thoughts that appear surprisingly and tell us how easy it will actually be to make the accident seem to come from the same world.
“Compared to about 50% who are familiar with ‘reading the void’ from our and Haymes’ studies, about 80% -90% are familiar with bothersome thoughts of all kinds,” says Teizman. “We may imagine something bad that could happen to us or our relatives. Some of us are unable to get rid of an inner voice that tells us unpleasant things. We may imagine sexual scenes just in the middle of the day unintentionally, or often recall embarrassing events from the past.”
A subtype of troublesome thoughts is “bad thoughts.” “People say they are in church and suddenly imagine what will happen if someone curses, or if they curse themselves. My wife sometimes says she imagines what it would feel like to pour coffee on my head. People see a sharp knife and immediately imagine all possible uses for it, themselves and others. “It’s a pretty normal thing,” says Tisman.
Harvard psychologist Lee Beer wrote an entire book on “Bad Thoughts”: The Imp of the Mind: Exploring the Silent Epidemic of Obsessive Bad Thoughts. He told of many patients who come to him with one of three types of thought: “forbidden” thoughts about self-harm and others, “forbidden” sexual thoughts and thoughts that are contrary to the patient’s religion. “Some of us have few and fleeting bad thoughts, and others have graphic, difficult and many thoughts. I estimate, following my research, that millions of people in the U.S. suffer from powerful and difficult ‘bad’ thoughts, and they are sure something is wrong with them, which in itself causes them a lot of suffering.” , Wrote.
Beer describes teens who come to him and tell of bothersome thoughts about sex within the family or about the possibility that they will hurt their classmates or their parents: “They are sure it means they are terrible, immoral people,” but that is not true.
Another study, conducted by Dr. Noah Chase Berman, formerly also of Harvard and now director of OCD at the College of the Holy Cross in Boston, shows that when parents believe that bad thoughts do indicate that their children are immoral (and they express it For example by telling them ‘apologize to your sister you thought you could impale with the pitchfork’ or ‘you should pray today to God to banish this thought’), the child’s condition will usually get worse.
The mind trains with the help of thoughts
An article by Louise Murray of the University of Illinois and Mark Finn of Cardiff University addressed the troubling thoughts of new mothers about harming their children. The article also raised the possibility of an urge to hurt resulting from frustration, lack of sleep or distress, and also a possibility of an urge to hurt resulting from “over-caution”, and even raised a third option where young mothers imagine harming a child to continue to feel separate. The conclusion of the article is that one way or another, most mothers who are attacked by such troublesome thoughts do not really intend to harm the child and the thought itself may make them feel, unjustly, that something is wrong with them, which in itself may actually cause them depression. Researchers call for the normalization of “bad” thoughts of mothers, though of course not of deeds.
Beer believes that children’s bad thoughts, which are probably more frequent than those of adults, stem from the preparation their brain makes to demonstrate to them how negative a situation can be, and in fact it is the brain’s self-training, how to take control of itself and prevent the problematic act.
“You seem to have read the void launching a bit into the world of OCD,” Teizman concludes. “It does not mean that people who experience this phenomenon are people with OCD. There are also many normal people who know thoughts that are associated with OCD, but they will not receive such a diagnosis. Paradoxically, those who worry about the thought and are bothered by it are more likely to have it.
So this is the recommendation? Just let it go?
“As far as we know – yes. The only way to deal with bothersome thoughts of any kind is to separate the thought from yourself, to continue to behave as you see fit despite the irrational thoughts, not to get carried away by them. Experience shows that such conduct does not attach much importance to thought. “This reduces bothersome thinking. And for those who do not succeed, those who continue to fear that the urge indicates something negative in them or that it may be dangerous, for those I would recommend OCD-directed treatment.”
Beer also agrees with this approach in his book. According to him, trying to control or turn off troublesome thoughts actually causes them to intensify, while accepting them as a normal part of life, but separate from the way we really intend to act, is the way to prevent them from taking over us. “If you were really going to murder someone, you probably would not feel such guilt about it,” he reassures. And if you were really going to jump off the cliff, you might not be so scared of it.