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Comment by bjlorenzen | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure this is just a subset of Intrusive Thoughts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusive_thought) which affect all people equally.

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I have minor Tourette syndrome and the compulsion to twitch is a very similar feeling to cute aggression. I also have intrusive thoughts. They are probably all related.

I've heard that when people are afraid of heights, when they come close to the edge of a bridge or a building they feel irresistsble desire to jump. I wonder if these two are related.

I'm scared of heights. When I get to the edge of something like that I don't necessarily want to jump but I do tend to try and picture in detail what would happen if I did...

Though I fell off a cliff as a child and don't really want to do it again. This could be why I don't get any strong desire to jump. Been there done that, wasn't very fun.

I'm scared of heights, and I have no such desire. I do, as a sibling commenter said, have unwanted visualizations of falling, etc. All super irrational, I'm aware, but trying telling that to me while I'm wide-eyed and white-knuckled at the edge of a building.

Conjecture, but I believe this is due to disordered preference for orienting oneself perpendicular to converging lines. Imagine yourself standing on a long straight road. Now imagine yourself looking over the side of a building, which is equivalent to looking along a similarly flat surface but from a much reduced height, as if you were lying on the road and trying to look at it over the tops of your feet.

A maladaptive orientation instinct might be caused by overcompensation for astigmatism or other distortion, or a strong preference for one kind of visual cue (converging parallels) over another (the more abstract knowledge of gravity and the associated impacts.

There is some evidence to suggest that premature babies are more likely to be subject to such disorders. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_cliff

The problem is that l'appel du vide does not just apply to jumping off a cliff. It tends to pop up in situations where somebody could take a very simple yet extremely dangerous or guaranteed life-ending action. The other common case of l'appel du vide is the thought of just letting the car swerve into a tree or pole.

I know, but I don't think that is the only factor in play. You could have vertigo without ever having the inclination to step in front of a train.

If that were the case then it wouldn't also result in, say, fantasizing about swerving off a straight road into a tree.

We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss -- we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from the danger. Unaccountably we remain. By slow degrees our sickness and dizziness and horror become merged in a cloud of unnamable feeling. By gradations, still more imperceptible, this cloud assumes shape, as did the vapor from the bottle out of which arose the genius in the Arabian Nights. But out of this our cloud upon the precipice's edge, there grows into palpability, a shape, far more terrible than any genius or any demon of a tale, and yet it is but a thought, although a fearful one, and one which chills the very marrow of our bones with the fierceness of the delight of its horror. It is merely the idea of what would be our sensations during the sweeping precipitancy of a fall from such a height. And this fall -- this rushing annihilation -- for the very reason that it involves that one most ghastly and loathsome of all the most ghastly and loathsome images of death and suffering which have ever presented themselves to our imagination -- for this very cause do we now the most vividly desire it.

In The Imp of the Perverse by E.A. Poe.

Thanks! I'd heard this phenomenon referred to as "the imp of the perverse" but I didn't know the source.

I've always thought it was some mental phenomenon where any sufficiently strong result ('don't jump') automatically comes with a weak inverse result ('jump!'). Never figured out whether it was some kind of mental self-check mechanism to catch strongly held false beliefs, or whether it's just a quirk of the way nerves work (sort of like a mental after-image), but I definitely get it. (And it's not just about jumping personally, if I'm standing holding a laptop near a long drop I'll feel a shadow of an urge to hurl it off... it's really weird.)

As far as I experience it, it's not the irresistible desire to jump by itself, but the idea of having an action at hand that would be the last action one would ever take--without having any recourse after it has been taken, and the fear that one might unconsciously or whimsically set into motion that action before being able to analyse it rationally.

It's the same fear as standing on a platform where a high-speed train passes by.

As I see it it's the fear of the small gap between realizing and rationalizing where there's a guarantee that the rationalization will not occur or be futile and irreversible.

I feel a pull, so my reaction is to retreat rather than jump. Paradoxically, the desire to jump results in placing myself at a safer distance.

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