September 1, 2018 • 45 mins
Ever wrestle with the illogical quasi-compulsion to throw yourself off a cliff or building? Don’t worry! You’re probably not suicidal, but merely touched by the 'call of the void' or 'high place phenomenon.' In this episode of the Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast, Robert Lamb and Christian Sager explore some of the more enlightening theories about this experience.(Originally published Feb. 9, 2017)
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And as always
on Saturdays, the vault opens up, the door swings wide,
and the darkness beckons. But today there's a special kind
of beckoning of the darkness. Right, that's right, We're gonna
be talking about the call of the void, jumping into
the void. This is an episode today with Christian back
(00:26):
at the Dawn of and this one deals with like
the the curious situation we often experience if we stay
at the top of a tall building. Now so might experience.
This is the the the the sort of fear. It's
not quite a it's like a mix between a fear
and a temptation to jump or or the way I've
I've experienced it before. And as in an example I
(00:48):
explained in this episode is that I'll be are to
be stay on the top of the Empire State Building
and there's no way I could actually jump off. I
couldn't you know, I wouldn't be able to scale the
barrier and then jump. But I I'll find myself thinking
about what would happen if I threw my wallet over
the side, you know, what if I what have I
got my my phone out and somehow managed to fling
that over the side as well. What is this peculiar
(01:10):
call of the void we experience? I think what would
happen is you would suddenly have a lot more free time,
probably probably, But then I'd be freaking about out about
who's trying to call me and email me? It would, yeah,
it would. It would be bad either way, the call
of the void or the call of the phone. I
don't know which is worse. Uh well, either way, this
is a really interesting topic. I'm glad you and Christian
(01:32):
explored it, and I'm glad we get to share it
with you out there in the audience. Yet again. Welcome
to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff works, Carl.
One day, the men and dogs were sitting on the
(01:54):
crest of a cliff which fell away straight down to
naked bedrock three ft below. John Thornton was sitting near
the edge, bucket his shoulder. A thoughtless whim sees Thornton,
and he drew the attention of hands and pete to
the experiment he had in mind. Jump buck He commanded,
sweeping his arm out over the chasm. The next instant.
He was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge while
(02:15):
Hands and Pete were dragging them back into safety. It's uncanny,
Pete said, after it was over and they had caught
their speech. Thornton shook his head. No, it is splendid
and it is terrible too, do you know it sometimes
makes me afraid. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert lamp and my name is Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
(02:37):
have you ever been standing at the edge of like
a cliff or a building, or maybe you're waiting for
a train, like a subway train. You just think I
should jump? Well, it never quite manifests itself as I
should jump. I find that for me, it manifests itself
(02:57):
as what if I did jump? Like you know, it's
this intense contemplation of the choice I have in the matter,
and the fact that I could if I wanted to
fling myself off of this cliff, you know, fall into
the Grand Canyon, go in front of a train, or
a variant of this thing I that I encountered a
(03:18):
top of the Empire State Building. Have you ever been
up to the top of the Empire State Building? You know,
that they have these, it's basically being in a cage match.
There's no you would have There's basically no way you
could throw yourself off the Empire State Building, at least
not on a whim. It would take, it would take
some some some planning and some effort. But what I
did find myself struggling with was what if I threw
my wallet over the side down into the street below.
(03:42):
That would be horrible, And so I ended ended up
wrestling with that possibility, which is kind of like throwing
a piece of your life over the side. Isn't there
that adage? And I think how stuff works is even
done an article on this about like what happens when
you throw a penny over the side of the Empire
State Building? And I think there's the urban legend is
(04:02):
that it can kill a person. Yeah, I don't know
what the science is bey and that I seem to
recall it doesn't quite pan out. It's it's been a
while since I've looked at that one, but I still
I'm not gonna go throwing pennies over I feel like
my wallet would maybe just balks somebody in't have probably
with my wallet would probably not go through somebody. Yeah. Well.
The other one of these is uh captured in Woody
(04:23):
Ellen's Annie Hall movie when Christopher Walkin is talking about
how he wants to swerve into traffic and at night
and he's looking at the other headlights coming the other way.
They're all related. Uh, and this is you. You out
there are probably going like, this is real morbid guys,
where are you going with this? Uh? This is an
(04:44):
actual phenomenon, so so common that it has multiple names,
and there has been a major study done on it. Um,
so we're gonna cover that today. It is the sudden
feeling that we want to put ourselves in harms way.
Examples of this often include the urge to jump off
a tap building or to veer into oncoming traffic. The
(05:07):
French term for it is a pel dou vede, which
means call of the Void, which I really like. And
that's how I how I came to this was there's
this pretty brutal hardcore band that I like called Call
of the Void, and I was typing it into Google
the other day in an article on this phenomenon popped
(05:27):
up and I was like, I've never heard of this before,
and then I said to you let's let's talk about this. Yeah,
I mean I knew about it, I've had the experience,
but I feel like most people have had the experience.
I would I would definitely like to hear from anyone
who has not had some variant of this. Now you
mentioned it. It's called often referred to as Call of
the Void, and some of our listeners might have recommended
the reading at the top of the episode as being
(05:49):
from Jack London's nineteen o three novel The Call of
the Wild. I like how this particular bit from that novel.
Certainly that this is the main part of the novel
that always sticks out in my mind because it gets
into similar territory as the Call of the Void, the
idea that with a split decision you could bring being
(06:10):
into un being. In this case it's the dog and
really the but the dog also um represents much about
the central character in The Call in the Wild as well.
What's strange about it is it's like the ultimate form
of control when you feel like you don't have control, right,
It's like this ultimate expression where you're like, oh, like
you think I don't have control over anything. The one
(06:32):
thing I can totally control is I could just kill
myself right now if I wanted to, which is horrible
to think about, but we're gonna get into it. There's
like a lot of theories as to where this thing
comes from. I don't know about you, but like when
I've experienced it, I feel it in the pit of
my stomach, like it's like a full body sensation. It's
not just like a little like thought like I wonder
(06:55):
if I if I jumped, you know, there's this weird Yeah,
it's gravity, visceral kind of vibe from it. It's it's
not so much like you're having to hold yourself down,
but sometimes you do kind of. I have been in
places where I feel like I kind of want to
squat down and maybe touch the ground a little bit,
even though I'm not near the edge now. One thing
(07:15):
I will say is that I have not felt this
recently because I find that when I am in places
with ledges or anything of that nature, I tend to
be there with my wife and son, and so I'm
more concerned about them falling out off, especially my son
being like just four going on five, He falls off
(07:35):
the stuff all the time, so like he and he
ends up generating all of my anxiety about people falling
or jumping, and then I don't I guess I have
less room for myself. Sure, well that makes sense based
on the cognitive dissonance theory that we're going to talk
about today, that that your parental authority would like override,
(07:58):
override the biologue goal like brain stuff that's going on
theoretically here that causes it. There's a whole theory as
to what causes this seems close, But let's go through
all this stuff and kind of figure it out. Before
we do that. I wanted to add a John paulse
Sartra observed this decades ago, and he said that this
(08:19):
emotion is unsettling because it creates an unnerving, shaky sensation
of not being able to trust one's own instincts, which
is which is really interesting. Like I hadn't even thought
about it as that that like you feel like, so
I just expressed it as a thing where it's like
you feel like you're in total control. But then his
version of it is you're totally out of control. Well,
(08:40):
it's kind of the you know, it's It's another reason
I like the Call of the Wild quote here, because
he talks about this thing being splendid and terrible at
the same time. And to to stand it's it's like
standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, Like the
Grand Canyon is an awesome experience to see that much emptiness,
but it's also you feel vulnerable. If you're gonna go
(09:00):
and you want to go in style, that seems like
that would be kind of like a beautiful way to
do it. Well, a lot of people have Yeah, I mean,
I'm not suicidal. Don't think that, audience, And we're gonna
talk about suicidal thoughts and relation to this as well,
because it's a pretty serious topic. But I could there
there's something, there is a beauty to it, and um,
(09:21):
this is where Mr Sigmund Freud comes in and we'll
we'll we'll talk about that as well. But first let's
look at the more recent study. This is really the
hinge of this episode. So in twleven, a team of
scientists from Florida State University decided to investigate it, and
this was in the Journal of Effective Disorders and the
authors of the paper were led by a woman named
(09:43):
Jennifer Haymes. She's was a graduate student and she's currently
faculty at Notre Dame UH and this was at F
s us Joiner Lab. And you might be going, why
would anybody want to study this? Like, where would this
come from? Well, the idea here is that could shine
light on the whole idea of a death drive, that
(10:04):
some suicides are impulsive and have nothing to do with depression. Uh.
And that was interesting. I hadn't really thought of that
before myself, but I could reading up more on Freud's
death drive theory, I guess I could see where that
came from. Yeah, I do have to say for my
own part, I'm I'm I'll entertain the possibility that that exists,
(10:26):
but I'm rather I'm rather doubtful that suicide is can
occur or or does occur in any significant to any
significant degree, completely isolated from depression or willful intent, Like
the idea that someone's just like, oh I could jump
off the into the canyon and die. Let's do it, bam, done,
(10:47):
the end of deal. Like, I can see the impulse
being a factor if there is already some underlying depression,
or if one already had some sort of a plan
in mind, and this is just like this is the
day that I act on it. Yeah, So you know,
I think that it's worth saying. Like, uh, from my
(11:08):
subjective experience, like I said, I myself am not suicidal,
and I haven't. I've had what we will refer to
later as suicidal thinking, but I've never had suicidal planning.
And there's a major difference, right and and and this
is sort of the call of the void, the high
the high place phenomenon. Those are those are versions of
(11:29):
suicidal thinking. That's about as far as it's gone for me, right, yeah, well,
suicidal thinking. I feel like it's often tied into with
the romance of suicide because we have so many stories
and you know, these generally are very lopsided in their
presentation of suicide. Uh, the display it is this this noble,
poetic thing that doomed dreamers and doomed lovers Romeo and Julia, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(11:53):
but we've all been teenagers, so we've all had moments
where we're like, oh, my life is so tragic, and
you might envision the scenario, but there's to your point,
there's a difference between envisioning it, daydreaming about it, and
uh and thinking about when everyone will say when you're gone,
versus actually putting some sort of plan in place. But
for our listeners, I do want to establish upfront, you know,
(12:14):
I have experience with people who were suicidal or have
committed suicide, so I am sympathetic to that, and I
don't want this episode to feel like it's callous. This
is connected to that, but it's a The suicidal thinking
that goes along with the call of the void syndrome
(12:36):
seems to be a far cry from the actual act
of it um and but we're gonna get into that
at the end of the episode. So back to this research.
They found that more than thirty percent of the people
they talked to said they had experienced this phenomenon at
least once, and the researchers refer to it in their
(12:57):
study as high place phenomenon. They weren't take king into
account like throwing yourself in front of a train or
driving an oncoming traffic uh. They were also curious whether
it was related to a person's history of suicidal thinking,
and from their findings they found that it is common
even among people who have no depression or suicidal thinking history.
(13:19):
So this was their methodology. They asked four and thirty
one college students whether and how often they had experienced
the urge to jump off of tall things. Then they
examined their depressive symptoms in their history of suicidal thoughts.
They also took a look at how sensitive these people
were to anxiety, as well as how fearful they were
(13:41):
of anxiety symptoms such as an elevated heartbeat and shortness
of breath. Among those who had never had suicidal thoughts, still,
seventeen percent of them had experienced the urge to jump.
Among those who had experienced sidal thoughts, fifty six percent
experienced it. So that's significant if if it lines up,
(14:05):
now we'll talk. There's a little bit of methodology stuff
with this, this that I'm calling the question. The researchers
were also interested specifically in the sensitivity to reactive safety
signals and if that corresponded to a higher likelihood of
experiencing the urge to jump. So to mark this reactivity,
they looked at levels of anxiety sensitivity, such as a
(14:27):
faster heartbeat. Uh. This was because previous research suggested that
high anxiety sensitivity is actually tied to a tendency for
us as human beings, to misinterpret random, innocuous bodily sensations
as being dangerous. Yeah, we we tend to We tend
to make that air and cognition because there is a
(14:48):
survival advantage in jumping to conclusions rather than not making
any conclusions. One gets you eaten by a tiger. One
just means you go about your daily life constantly looking
for the tiger that might eave. Yeah, I mean I've
actually experienced this, I'd say, in like the last two weeks,
where like I'll get up and I'll read about current
events in the news, and my heart will start beating
(15:08):
rapidly and I'll go, oh, this is is there something wrong?
Do I need to go see my doctor? And I
realized it's anxiety. It's it's not normal, but I'm having
a normal anxious reaction to the things that I'm reading about. Right,
But then my thought is like, oh, what if I
have a heart attack? You know. So this is kind
of along those lines where the ideas that we misinterpret
(15:30):
these random bodily sensations as being dangerous. Okay. So their
studies finding was that yes, more sensitivity to anxiety was
related to the frequency of the urge to jump, especially
in people who had never experienced suicidal thoughts. They also
interpreted this as people without a history of suicidal thoughts
(15:54):
as being more sensitive to bodily cues that they could misinterpret.
So that's interesting. So if you've never et suicidal thoughts,
they're saying you're more likely to interpret say like your
heart beating faster as as something of danger. It's interesting. Yeah,
I mean, it's kind of like if you if you've
ever had an anxiety attack, if you if you have,
(16:16):
if you have one and they're rare, then the first
time you have one, it can be extremely alarmente. If
you think, oh goodness, I'm about to die now. So
the study ultimately translates as follows, people with high anxiety
sensitivity were more likely to have higher chances of suicidal thoughts. Okay,
that makes sense. So if you're sensitive to the bodily
(16:38):
reactions and you're worried about being anxious, then you're more
likely to have suicidal thoughts. But subsequently, you were also
more likely to report experiencing this call of the void phenomenon.
So that's interesting. Why do we experience this though Like?
Where is this coming from? Well, let's take a quick
break and we come back. We'll dive into that very question.
(17:05):
All right, we're back. So one theory about this call
of the void phenomenon or the idea of high place phenomenon,
is that there's something going on with a temporary uncoupling
of our different perceptual systems in our brains. It's kind
of like cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Yeah, the idea, and this
comes up comes up all the time on the podcast,
(17:26):
the idea that you have two different ideas, two different
inclinations in your mind, and they conflict with each other.
So the classic, the easy one to go to here,
of course, is oh, I I think homosexuality is wrong,
but I have homosexual thoughts in my head. These two
do not go with one another, um and this generates
it's kind of a friction in the mind exactly. So
(17:49):
their theory was that when you're standing on the edge
of a skyscraper, your brain has fast fear circuitry, that's
what they called it. Obviously it's not circuitry that and
this may alert you of danger, just the danger of hey,
you could fall, But then our perceptual system in our
brain is slower than our fear system, and that kicks
(18:11):
in afterwards and it makes you realize there's actually no danger.
So to make sense of the safety signal. Our brain
mixes this up as cognitive dissonance and we assume we
want to jump, which is why people get confused by this.
So this is interesting. So individuals who are experiencing this
are not necessarily suicidal. Instead, it seems to reflect their
(18:34):
sensitivity to internal cues affirming their actual will to live.
So that lines up with what we're saying earlier that
they're sensitive to, like oh, I'm feeling anxious or oh
I'm feeling depressed or whatever, So it makes sense that
they would be more sensitive to their both their fear
system and their perception system. Yeah. I do like how
the main idea here is that you're safe, but you're
(18:57):
still taking in the sensory data says you're not safe.
And I think that we actually get a little bit
of this when we watch a particularly terrifying video like
we've all, especially within the age of go pro. I'm
sure everyone has seen like base jumping, crazy skiing videos,
stuff with great heights, or people climbing up antennas, and
you watch it and you couldn't be more safe watching
(19:21):
it in your you know, living room, in your office,
on your phone or your personal computer. But you feel
a visceral, you know, if it's probably empathic. But also
you're taking in certain sense data about a dangerous environment
and you can't help it feel part of that. Yeah. Yeah,
that's interesting, and I think I'm leaning towards agreeing with
(19:42):
this theory. But let's remember that this study, there's only
one study on this as far as I can tell,
and it isn't conclusive. Um. Their explanation is simply theoretical
and it doesn't have neurological evidence. Uh, the methodology also
has some weak so let's acknowledge those. First of all,
they only used university students, and let's be honest, university
(20:05):
students are not representative of humanity, right right, Yeah, it
tends to be a profile of a very specific socio economic,
racial division of society. Yeah, and the volunteers themselves were confessing, well,
they may have misremembered their experience or even falsely reported it.
So that doesn't mean the studies flawed. It just means
(20:26):
we need more research. Um. So a proposal for this
is to actually conduct an experiment where scientists would have
to take subjects and position them at different heights to
test at what elevation they begin having the thought to jump. Um,
there's another explanation that goes along I think with what
you were saying about the watching those videos, which is
(20:49):
that it could simply be connected to our thrill of
not buckling under fear, which is a kind of cognitive dissonance. Um,
this is the same reason why we go to haunted houses, right,
both real and uh, you know, fun haunted houses. But
like think about like when you're a little kid, uh
and somebody says, let's go that house over there is haunted,
(21:11):
I dare you to go into it, Right, It's kind
of the same vibe. Uh. And then subsequently you go
to something like I don't know, our version is another
world here in Atlanta. You go to that you know
somebody's going to jump out with a fake chainsaw and
try to scare you. But the thrill of overcoming that
fear is part of why you go and pay money
to do it. Yeah, I mean, it fills you with endorphins.
(21:31):
You're you're very much living in the moment. People who
aren't into meditation or yoga, they still might go to
a haunted house or watch a scary movie, and that's
that's kind of meditative in a sense. It puts you
in the now. Yeah, it's It's probably another reason why
jump scares are so successful in horror films. There's an
addiction to it. Yeah, And it's simple and it works,
(21:52):
and it ties into our basic evolutionary state to be
on the lookout for the tiger that jumps out of
the grass. Now, there's a no take on all of this,
and it ties in, I think nicely to what you
said about the varying heights. At what height does it
kick in? For my own part, I feel like there
is definitely a difference between any call of the void
(22:15):
that occurs at at lower heights as opposed to like
truly awesome heights like Grand Canyon, cliff Edge type. Total obliteration. Yeah,
total obliteration, I think is the thing because it's such
it's such a it would be such a drastic choice. Okay,
it would be such a choice between life and and
and I don't know. I almost to say death like
(22:37):
puts too much of an atmospheric twist on it, but
more like between being an unding and I think this
is I keep thinking this is the two roads diverge
in a Yellow Woods approach. Um, So in the choose
your own adventure book that is life. We encounter plenty
of working paths, right, but many of these are hardly
choices at all. I mean, on some level, we all
(22:58):
choose whether they're going to go to work this morning
or find a liquor store and drink our purchase in
the woods behind the Yeah. Yeah, I mean for most
of us, a lot of people struggle with that every morning. Well,
some people realistically do. No, I'm not I'm not being sarcastic. Yeah,
but but for many of us, it's not really a choice.
Like the things we do are the things we do.
(23:19):
We have this pattern and there's really this is where
we get into that idea that we're not really making
choices and more if at all. However, there are choices
that are more real than others. Where two paths of
equal weight and possibility are presented, and uh, and what
is weightier than the old to be or not to be?
The choice between being and unbing that stands before us
(23:40):
when we stand at the edge of a great expanse.
So it's not so much that we're tempted, but that
our path choosing brain can't help but engage in one
of its many cognitive superpowers, cognitive superpower that we all
possess and uh and used to thrive. And this is
a chronosthesia, which is also known as mental time to travel.
So this entails our ability to be aware of our
(24:03):
past and future and to envision multiple possible futures before us.
So it's the key to our survival. But it's also
the reason you might listen to NPR in the morning
and mentally time travel to the dawn of the Third
World War. So in that anxiety, yeah, the anxiety, anxiety
comes out and you feel it in your body. So
in that moment in the car listening to NBR, we're
(24:25):
forced to wonder what what we're capable of, what we're
willing to lose to gain. And on some level, it's
kind of like the you know, the scene in the
Old Testament with Abraham raising his dagger up in the
sky and then above his son Isaac, and it's just well,
the hand of the Angel come in time to spare him. Yeah, yeah,
(24:46):
looking to something beyond, which gets into the Freudian aspect. Yeah,
so that's another possible explanation for it. I tend to
feel like we've got some of this definitely a part
of it. But I also think the co native dissonance
argument is also very valid, and it does like we've
talked before on the show about how situations of cognitive
(25:07):
dissonance often lend themselves well to supernatural experience. That's not
to say actual supernatural occurrence, but the experience of something
supernatural to us, especially in our demon possession, exorcism, matter
sism episode, that is hugely tied to cognitive dissonance. Yeah.
And when you get down to it, like the the
idea of of encountering the choice between being and un being,
(25:30):
this this kind of panicky pondering over to what extent
you have free willed, to what extent you have control
over your fate? I mean that is that's pretty supernatural
sounding to me. Yeah. Yeah, Well this is a good
opportunity for us to get into a guy who, let's
be honest, in some situations, was quasi supernatural. Uh and
(25:52):
his name was Sigmund Freud. Uh So Freud after a
lot of his better known principles, Uh connected this to
all the phenomenon to an idea that sometimes is referred
to as a death wish, although that just calls to
mind Charles Bronson for me, but it is referred to
(26:14):
as the death drive, articulated in his ninety essay Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, and this describes a drive in all
of us towards self destruction and a return to the inorganic. Now,
I used a paper by Joanne Faulkner on the subject
(26:34):
to sort of see unpackaged this. Now. She argues that
the death drive is when Freud departs from scientific methodology entirely,
and it articulates what he thought of as higher functions
in the psyche that weren't necessarily empirical. Okay, so this
is why I say, like, we're getting into supernatural territory here.
(26:58):
Freud thought this was beyond sciences. Um, it's highly speculative
and it's not grounded in scientific perspective. But Freud's idea
was that the death drive circumvented our pleasure in an
effort to undo a person as an organic whole, and
so as such it gave us both pleasure and discomfort.
(27:21):
I can sort of see where he's coming from here
based on what we were previously talking about with like,
I don't know, scares right, Like it's both pleasurable and uncomfortable.
But his idea, of course, being Freud, there has to
be this model framework so that everything fits within. And
it was that the death drive was the opposite of
(27:41):
what he called the life drive or the libido. And
while the libido attaches itself to others and creates ties
of affection, the death drive destroys relationships and strives for disintegration.
So if the libido manifests insects, the death drive manifests
in aggression, and if this is directed inward, it could
(28:03):
result in suicide. But here's the thing. Does the death
drive lead to what we today understand as depression? Right?
Like Freud didn't really have a grasp on that the
way we do now. It's possible if it's directed inward,
I guess. But in fact, some Eastern philosophy indicates that
self centered acts maybe a form of this kind of
(28:26):
self destruction, That selfishness itself isolates us from others, leads
us to not having support. So maybe there's a little
bit of a connection between depression and death drive. I
don't know. I'm not a pcent on board with this.
I see how it could sort of make sense at
the time, and it's connected to thoughts that we're having.
(28:46):
But huh, what is interesting you mentioned the Eastern philosophies.
It is interesting to think of self destruction perhaps is
it's not merely well, let's say, to to take self
destruction and think of it in terms of of of
the of of the wheel of sam Sara and the
different states, and the idea that you know, you're reincarnated
into two upper and lower forms. Yeah. One of the
(29:08):
realms is that of the hungry ghosts, where one is
just you know, constantly grasping for something and and and
unable to to fill yourself with it. And and there's
another realm, which is more of the hell room. And
this is where I feel like things really line up
with this idea of death drive just this you know,
rageful uh, you know, assault on the things that anger you.
(29:29):
I can give you like a personal version of this
that I experienced. And this might be a little bit
t m I, but um I often I'm compelled by
the urge to just go be somewhere in complete isolation.
Like I think when I when I have this urge,
it's like, oh, I like a like a rundown motel
(29:51):
in the middle of nowhere, off of a highway somewhere, right,
and I'll just sitting there for a week, Like there's
something about that that's just very compelling to me. And
I don't want to destroy myself. I don't want to
commit suicide, but there's something about it that that draws
me there, right, And I think based on what you're
(30:12):
talking about here, there's a similar idea here, right, Like
if you believe in reincarnation and you think to yourself, well,
if I die, I'm going to be reincarnated, possibly as
a lower life form. Right, there's something kind of zen
about that, right, There's something kind of relaxing about the
idea of like I'll come back as a toad. Let's
(30:32):
just live life as a toad, and I won't have
as many concerns to bear. It's true, yeah, now, But
I like this idea that you brought up here too
because it also brings to mind like what each of
us are. So we're certainly we're an organism that's that's alive.
We're also an organism that's is generally moving in various
uh social shares, and you have all of these kind
(30:54):
of like invisible spider webs of social obligation all around us,
and so to do to walk away from all of
that first, say a week and go to this cabin
in the woods. You are not necessarily destroying yourself, but
you might be doing damage to these various social spider
webs that are that have bound you up totally. And
(31:15):
I can see where it would be at once liberating
to walk away from all of those, uh, and then
but then at the same time many would argue, well,
that is self destructive. You were doing damage to these
social structures that had helped maintain you. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
And that's compelling to write. The pop culture example of
(31:35):
this that drew me in the most, And my wife
immediately recognized it when we saw this, and she's like,
you love this, don't you was And spoilers for this
TV show if you don't want to, you might learn
something you don't want to know about Breaking Bad here.
But in Breaking Bad, there's a point where the main
character it goes in hiding to New Hampshire for a
(31:58):
year and he just lives in if small cottage with
nothing but like you know, canned food and newspapers for
a year and he just sits there and thinks on
what he's done and sleeps and eats and is he
just is and he's entrapped by snow when we find him.
And I saw it, and I was just like, oh God,
(32:19):
that that seems like the best vacation ever to me.
But at the cost of all of his social relationships,
which is sort of the point in the show. Uh.
You know, this reminds me a lot of a Warren
Zevon song that also when I when I have this feeling,
I'll play this song and listen to it. It's called
Splendid Isolation. It's great because the lyrics are basically rolling
(32:42):
through these three different through or four different scenarios that
he is craving, like I want to live on the
Upper east Side and never go down in the street,
you know, put tinfoil up on the window. I want
to live in the desert like Georgia O'Keefe. You know,
he's doing scenarios where um, we're we're Waren is talking
about just walking away from everything and just encapsulating himself
(33:04):
in uh in in in total isolation and and ultimately
kind of self destructive self centeredness, because he ends up
like making comparisons to to Neverland Ranch interesting, you know,
locking yourself up in your own private Disney sort of thing. Well,
I never put tinfoil on my window, but in my
(33:24):
twenties I have to admit, Uh, I took cardboard and
nailed it up over all the windows in my bedroom
just because, like I wanted complete and utter darkness in there.
Did you have a black light poster? No? No, I
didn't missed opportunities mushroom wizards. Well, back to this Freud thing,
(33:48):
I think it reeks of the subjective. It's a little
bit of magical thinking, which is fun, but most people
in this realm, in this discipline think of it as
being eccentric. Regardless, it does apply to depression. If you
understand that there's an innate voice that wishes for death
and destruction, well that's that's helpful, right At least in
(34:11):
therapy you can help separate that and distance yourself from
those thoughts, and that takes away their power and allows
you to challenge them and minimize them and disregard them.
So there's something to that. People who have just like
outright dismissed Freud. I'm sort of in the middle, Like,
I don't buy it a hundred percent of the time,
(34:32):
but I do think that there's some value and that
he helped the profession sort of edge along slowly. Yeah,
I mean I I always come back to my my
lens analogy, where what I what I want to walk
around with with the Freud lens in place all the time,
with my Freud goggles on all the time. No, I
would not, but I do find it as helpful in
(34:52):
varying scenarios to pull the the Freud lens down over
my own vision, of my own worldview and think, oh, well,
how might the supply to the current scenario, What does what?
How does Freud illuminate what's going on here? Well, why
don't we take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to delve into some actual statistics about suicidal
(35:13):
thinking that may help us unraveled this call of the
void phenomenon a little more. Alright, we're back. So when
mental health professionals refer to these call of the void moments,
they usually call it suicidal ideation. But that term seems
(35:35):
broad for our purposes here today, So let's let's try
to separate out what the difference might be. Okay. In eleven,
the c d C conducted a really big study examining
statistics about suicide, suicidal thinking, uh, and um, suicidal preparation,
and they found that three point seven percent of adults
(35:57):
in the United States had had suicidal thoughts in just
the last year. Now, let's put that into perspective. That's
eight point three million people. That's a lot of people.
Other studies have placed this even higher, saying that it's
actually around eight to ten of the population. Now let's
(36:17):
look at the previous study on the high place phenomenon.
That's not even close to the thirty to fifty percent
of people who reported that they had experienced that phenomenon. Right,
So it seems like what we think of as suicidal
ideation and and high place phenomenon or call of the void,
those are different. It seems like it suggests that there's
(36:39):
there's some kind of different thought process going on there. Yeah,
And of course with all of this, it depends on
exactly how you're phrasing the question and how the individual
on the other end views suicidal thoughts, uh, etcetera. I mean,
because the big thing is like, what does that individual's
culture say about suicide? Yeah, Now, even there there's this
(36:59):
is the kind of thing that we would have to
bust out in a longer episode. But even within the
United States, that you're going to have varying subsets of
people that are going to have different ideas about suicide. Yeah,
and that actually plays in these statistics as well. Uh
In the c d C report, they actually summarize the
data on ninety two thousand, two hundred and sixty four respondents.
(37:22):
But this establishes a difference between having suicidal thoughts and
actually making plans for a suicide or attempting it. Plans
and attempts are very different from just thinking about it. Okay,
The estimates vary based on a couple of things, sociodemographic
factors as well as the region of the country that
(37:43):
you live in. So what you're just saying, here we go.
Suicidal thoughts were higher among young adults between the ages
of eighteen to twenty nine than they were for people
over thirty. It was also significantly higher for women. In general.
Non Hispanic Whites were the group with the highest prevalence
of suicidal thoughts, while non Hispanic Asians were the group
(38:05):
with the lowest suicidal thoughts. And regional factors, this is
really complicated, but they think it could be related to
indicators such as divorce rates or resources to access like healthcare. Uh,
and so the cause and effect relationship here is unknown,
but there's a there's a couple of things like, for instance,
(38:27):
adults with less than a high school education and those
who are unemployed at the time were more likely to
have these thoughts. Finally, those in the Midwest and the
West were more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those
in the Northeast in the South. Now, I don't know
how to unpack that, but what you presented sounds sounds close,
(38:49):
which is that like, various cultures have different beliefs about suicide, right,
and and or like they said that, there's like real
world factors like how much access they have to healthcare
or or or do they have a job, things like that.
So there's limitations to this accounting though that we should
note as well. For instance, previous studies indicate that adults,
(39:11):
when they're talking about suicidal thoughts, they under report, especially
when they're talking about when they were adolescents. So if
they're adults now and they're saying, well, when I was
an adolescent, this is you know, this is how often
I experienced that they're they're known to under report. That
makes sense to me, Yeah, I mean, I mean you're
a different person when you're adult when you're an adolescent,
(39:32):
So you're really kind of teasing apart the thoughts and
motivations of a different you entire So I can see
where there might be a tendency to say, oh, well
that that that twenty year old me, that eighteen year
old me. You didn't know what you're talking about now,
even serious about that. And this study also didn't account
for a couple of populations. Uh, first of all, institutionalized populations,
(39:54):
which would probably have I mean, we would assume would
have a higher rate of thinking about suicide. It and
it totally cut out any kind of Native American populations.
So and that wasn't like on purpose, it was just
because they didn't have access to enough evidence. Yeah, I
think there is a large factor here that comes down
to is suicide an open pathway to this individual? Is
(40:18):
it at all socially acceptable? To what degree is it
socially acceptable? And that is going to be governed by
your culture, your history. Indeed, what what books and movies,
what beats of bits of fiction you you you value,
But these are all going to help to skew this
idea of of whether or not suicide is a practical
(40:42):
option for an individual. Yeah, but very different from the
idea of standing on a ledge and looking and just
kind of getting that urge to je right. So that's
why I put these statistics in here to sort of
just give you like, these are very different things, and
we can see the statistical differences just between these two studies.
(41:03):
It's also worth remembering all of this stuff for both
studies is self reported, and that is not a reliable
Now to sort of pull out of the gloomier aspects
of this this topic, um, I will ask everyone to
to think about the call of the void. You know, uh,
the situation in which the gravity of disastrous choices. You know,
(41:25):
it's not merely anxiety inducing or or threatening to one
sense of self control, but it is exhilarating. It's it's
it's sort of endorphin pumping high that want to achieves
from skydiving or even less dangerous smaller acts. And and
plus what is the true call of the void but
but a contemplation, however unformed of oblivion, a complete emptying
(41:47):
of self, not merely hearing the call of the void,
but but kind of touching the void, having almost a
spiritual moment. To go back to that quote from Call
of the Wild again, you know something that is at
once splendid and terrible. Yeah, And so, as we've been
doing in some of our episodes recently, we want to
make sure if you heard this and this like touched
upon something for you, and and you were hearing these
(42:09):
statistics or whatever and you thought, well, this this resonates
within me and I'm a little concerned. There's actually a
nonprofit that we would like to throw a line out too,
so that you, in case you're feeling that way, have
some support. And it's the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Uh.
It's a support line. It's seven, it's free, it's totally confidential.
(42:33):
It's for people who are in distress. Uh. And it
helps prevent crises and provides resources for you and your
loved ones. So maybe it's not you, maybe it's somebody
you know. Uh. So the number for that is one
eight hundred two seven three eight to five five. Again,
it's one eight hundred two seven three eight two five five.
(42:57):
All right, and hey, if you want to hear more
at the pisodes of stuff to blow your mind. If
you want to check out videos, blog post, you name
it links out to our social media accounts, head on
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right,
and I want to hear from you the audience. Have
you experienced the call of a void? Have you thought
about jumping off a tall building or the Grand Canyon
(43:17):
or maybe even onto a train track before, but of
course you didn't want to. You just got mixed up
with these feelings inside. That's that's basically how we all
feel nowadays. I'm just so mixed up with these feelings inside. Uh,
let us know. You can let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
or Instagram, or you can write us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. And it close
(43:39):
out here today. I'm just gonna read another quote. This
one comes from a book by Robert Graves. A number
of you may be familiar with him from his more
popular work such as I Claudius, but he also wrote
a book called Goodbye to All That, and he talks
about the Great Four. He talks about mountain climbing, and
this is just a quick quote where he talks about climbing.
My worst climb was on a little wit the most
(44:00):
formidable of the precipices, when at a point that needed
most concentration, a raven circled round the party in great sweeps.
I found this curiously unsettling, because one climbs only up
and down or sideways, and the ravens seem to be
suggesting diverse other possible dimensions of movement, tempting us to
(44:21):
let go our hold and join him. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot Com? No,
Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And as always
on Saturdays, the vault opens up, the door swings wide,
and the darkness beckons. But today there's a special kind
of beckoning of the darkness. Right, that's right, We're gonna
be talking about the call of the void, jumping into
the void. This is an episode today with Christian back
(00:26):
at the Dawn of and this one deals with like
the the curious situation we often experience if we stay
at the top of a tall building. Now so might experience.
This is the the the the sort of fear. It's
not quite a it's like a mix between a fear
and a temptation to jump or or the way I've
I've experienced it before. And as in an example I
(00:48):
explained in this episode is that I'll be are to
be stay on the top of the Empire State Building
and there's no way I could actually jump off. I
couldn't you know, I wouldn't be able to scale the
barrier and then jump. But I I'll find myself thinking
about what would happen if I threw my wallet over
the side, you know, what if I what have I
got my my phone out and somehow managed to fling
that over the side as well. What is this peculiar
(01:10):
call of the void we experience? I think what would
happen is you would suddenly have a lot more free time,
probably probably, But then I'd be freaking about out about
who's trying to call me and email me? It would, yeah,
it would. It would be bad either way, the call
of the void or the call of the phone. I
don't know which is worse. Uh well, either way, this
is a really interesting topic. I'm glad you and Christian
(01:32):
explored it, and I'm glad we get to share it
with you out there in the audience. Yet again. Welcome
to stuff to blow your mind from how stuff works, Carl.
One day, the men and dogs were sitting on the
(01:54):
crest of a cliff which fell away straight down to
naked bedrock three ft below. John Thornton was sitting near
the edge, bucket his shoulder. A thoughtless whim sees Thornton,
and he drew the attention of hands and pete to
the experiment he had in mind. Jump buck He commanded,
sweeping his arm out over the chasm. The next instant.
He was grappling with Buck on the extreme edge while
(02:15):
Hands and Pete were dragging them back into safety. It's uncanny,
Pete said, after it was over and they had caught
their speech. Thornton shook his head. No, it is splendid
and it is terrible too, do you know it sometimes
makes me afraid. Hey, welcome to stuff to blow your mind.
My name is Robert lamp and my name is Christian Sager. Hey, Robert,
(02:37):
have you ever been standing at the edge of like
a cliff or a building, or maybe you're waiting for
a train, like a subway train. You just think I
should jump? Well, it never quite manifests itself as I
should jump. I find that for me, it manifests itself
(02:57):
as what if I did jump? Like you know, it's
this intense contemplation of the choice I have in the matter,
and the fact that I could if I wanted to
fling myself off of this cliff, you know, fall into
the Grand Canyon, go in front of a train, or
a variant of this thing I that I encountered a
(03:18):
top of the Empire State Building. Have you ever been
up to the top of the Empire State Building? You know,
that they have these, it's basically being in a cage match.
There's no you would have There's basically no way you
could throw yourself off the Empire State Building, at least
not on a whim. It would take, it would take
some some some planning and some effort. But what I
did find myself struggling with was what if I threw
my wallet over the side down into the street below.
(03:42):
That would be horrible, And so I ended ended up
wrestling with that possibility, which is kind of like throwing
a piece of your life over the side. Isn't there
that adage? And I think how stuff works is even
done an article on this about like what happens when
you throw a penny over the side of the Empire
State Building? And I think there's the urban legend is
(04:02):
that it can kill a person. Yeah, I don't know
what the science is bey and that I seem to
recall it doesn't quite pan out. It's it's been a
while since I've looked at that one, but I still
I'm not gonna go throwing pennies over I feel like
my wallet would maybe just balks somebody in't have probably
with my wallet would probably not go through somebody. Yeah. Well.
The other one of these is uh captured in Woody
(04:23):
Ellen's Annie Hall movie when Christopher Walkin is talking about
how he wants to swerve into traffic and at night
and he's looking at the other headlights coming the other way.
They're all related. Uh, and this is you. You out
there are probably going like, this is real morbid guys,
where are you going with this? Uh? This is an
(04:44):
actual phenomenon, so so common that it has multiple names,
and there has been a major study done on it. Um,
so we're gonna cover that today. It is the sudden
feeling that we want to put ourselves in harms way.
Examples of this often include the urge to jump off
a tap building or to veer into oncoming traffic. The
(05:07):
French term for it is a pel dou vede, which
means call of the Void, which I really like. And
that's how I how I came to this was there's
this pretty brutal hardcore band that I like called Call
of the Void, and I was typing it into Google
the other day in an article on this phenomenon popped
(05:27):
up and I was like, I've never heard of this before,
and then I said to you let's let's talk about this. Yeah,
I mean I knew about it, I've had the experience,
but I feel like most people have had the experience.
I would I would definitely like to hear from anyone
who has not had some variant of this. Now you
mentioned it. It's called often referred to as Call of
the Void, and some of our listeners might have recommended
the reading at the top of the episode as being
(05:49):
from Jack London's nineteen o three novel The Call of
the Wild. I like how this particular bit from that novel.
Certainly that this is the main part of the novel
that always sticks out in my mind because it gets
into similar territory as the Call of the Void, the
idea that with a split decision you could bring being
(06:10):
into un being. In this case it's the dog and
really the but the dog also um represents much about
the central character in The Call in the Wild as well.
What's strange about it is it's like the ultimate form
of control when you feel like you don't have control, right,
It's like this ultimate expression where you're like, oh, like
you think I don't have control over anything. The one
(06:32):
thing I can totally control is I could just kill
myself right now if I wanted to, which is horrible
to think about, but we're gonna get into it. There's
like a lot of theories as to where this thing
comes from. I don't know about you, but like when
I've experienced it, I feel it in the pit of
my stomach, like it's like a full body sensation. It's
not just like a little like thought like I wonder
(06:55):
if I if I jumped, you know, there's this weird Yeah,
it's gravity, visceral kind of vibe from it. It's it's
not so much like you're having to hold yourself down,
but sometimes you do kind of. I have been in
places where I feel like I kind of want to
squat down and maybe touch the ground a little bit,
even though I'm not near the edge now. One thing
(07:15):
I will say is that I have not felt this
recently because I find that when I am in places
with ledges or anything of that nature, I tend to
be there with my wife and son, and so I'm
more concerned about them falling out off, especially my son
being like just four going on five, He falls off
(07:35):
the stuff all the time, so like he and he
ends up generating all of my anxiety about people falling
or jumping, and then I don't I guess I have
less room for myself. Sure, well that makes sense based
on the cognitive dissonance theory that we're going to talk
about today, that that your parental authority would like override,
(07:58):
override the biologue goal like brain stuff that's going on
theoretically here that causes it. There's a whole theory as
to what causes this seems close, But let's go through
all this stuff and kind of figure it out. Before
we do that. I wanted to add a John paulse
Sartra observed this decades ago, and he said that this
(08:19):
emotion is unsettling because it creates an unnerving, shaky sensation
of not being able to trust one's own instincts, which
is which is really interesting. Like I hadn't even thought
about it as that that like you feel like, so
I just expressed it as a thing where it's like
you feel like you're in total control. But then his
version of it is you're totally out of control. Well,
(08:40):
it's kind of the you know, it's It's another reason
I like the Call of the Wild quote here, because
he talks about this thing being splendid and terrible at
the same time. And to to stand it's it's like
standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, Like the
Grand Canyon is an awesome experience to see that much emptiness,
but it's also you feel vulnerable. If you're gonna go
(09:00):
and you want to go in style, that seems like
that would be kind of like a beautiful way to
do it. Well, a lot of people have Yeah, I mean,
I'm not suicidal. Don't think that, audience, And we're gonna
talk about suicidal thoughts and relation to this as well,
because it's a pretty serious topic. But I could there
there's something, there is a beauty to it, and um,
(09:21):
this is where Mr Sigmund Freud comes in and we'll
we'll we'll talk about that as well. But first let's
look at the more recent study. This is really the
hinge of this episode. So in twleven, a team of
scientists from Florida State University decided to investigate it, and
this was in the Journal of Effective Disorders and the
authors of the paper were led by a woman named
(09:43):
Jennifer Haymes. She's was a graduate student and she's currently
faculty at Notre Dame UH and this was at F
s us Joiner Lab. And you might be going, why
would anybody want to study this? Like, where would this
come from? Well, the idea here is that could shine
light on the whole idea of a death drive, that
(10:04):
some suicides are impulsive and have nothing to do with depression. Uh.
And that was interesting. I hadn't really thought of that
before myself, but I could reading up more on Freud's
death drive theory, I guess I could see where that
came from. Yeah, I do have to say for my
own part, I'm I'm I'll entertain the possibility that that exists,
(10:26):
but I'm rather I'm rather doubtful that suicide is can
occur or or does occur in any significant to any
significant degree, completely isolated from depression or willful intent, Like
the idea that someone's just like, oh I could jump
off the into the canyon and die. Let's do it, bam, done,
(10:47):
the end of deal. Like, I can see the impulse
being a factor if there is already some underlying depression,
or if one already had some sort of a plan
in mind, and this is just like this is the
day that I act on it. Yeah, So you know,
I think that it's worth saying. Like, uh, from my
(11:08):
subjective experience, like I said, I myself am not suicidal,
and I haven't. I've had what we will refer to
later as suicidal thinking, but I've never had suicidal planning.
And there's a major difference, right and and and this
is sort of the call of the void, the high
the high place phenomenon. Those are those are versions of
(11:29):
suicidal thinking. That's about as far as it's gone for me, right, yeah, well,
suicidal thinking. I feel like it's often tied into with
the romance of suicide because we have so many stories
and you know, these generally are very lopsided in their
presentation of suicide. Uh, the display it is this this noble,
poetic thing that doomed dreamers and doomed lovers Romeo and Julia, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
(11:53):
but we've all been teenagers, so we've all had moments
where we're like, oh, my life is so tragic, and
you might envision the scenario, but there's to your point,
there's a difference between envisioning it, daydreaming about it, and
uh and thinking about when everyone will say when you're gone,
versus actually putting some sort of plan in place. But
for our listeners, I do want to establish upfront, you know,
(12:14):
I have experience with people who were suicidal or have
committed suicide, so I am sympathetic to that, and I
don't want this episode to feel like it's callous. This
is connected to that, but it's a The suicidal thinking
that goes along with the call of the void syndrome
(12:36):
seems to be a far cry from the actual act
of it um and but we're gonna get into that
at the end of the episode. So back to this research.
They found that more than thirty percent of the people
they talked to said they had experienced this phenomenon at
least once, and the researchers refer to it in their
(12:57):
study as high place phenomenon. They weren't take king into
account like throwing yourself in front of a train or
driving an oncoming traffic uh. They were also curious whether
it was related to a person's history of suicidal thinking,
and from their findings they found that it is common
even among people who have no depression or suicidal thinking history.
(13:19):
So this was their methodology. They asked four and thirty
one college students whether and how often they had experienced
the urge to jump off of tall things. Then they
examined their depressive symptoms in their history of suicidal thoughts.
They also took a look at how sensitive these people
were to anxiety, as well as how fearful they were
(13:41):
of anxiety symptoms such as an elevated heartbeat and shortness
of breath. Among those who had never had suicidal thoughts, still,
seventeen percent of them had experienced the urge to jump.
Among those who had experienced sidal thoughts, fifty six percent
experienced it. So that's significant if if it lines up,
(14:05):
now we'll talk. There's a little bit of methodology stuff
with this, this that I'm calling the question. The researchers
were also interested specifically in the sensitivity to reactive safety
signals and if that corresponded to a higher likelihood of
experiencing the urge to jump. So to mark this reactivity,
they looked at levels of anxiety sensitivity, such as a
(14:27):
faster heartbeat. Uh. This was because previous research suggested that
high anxiety sensitivity is actually tied to a tendency for
us as human beings, to misinterpret random, innocuous bodily sensations
as being dangerous. Yeah, we we tend to We tend
to make that air and cognition because there is a
(14:48):
survival advantage in jumping to conclusions rather than not making
any conclusions. One gets you eaten by a tiger. One
just means you go about your daily life constantly looking
for the tiger that might eave. Yeah, I mean I've
actually experienced this, I'd say, in like the last two weeks,
where like I'll get up and I'll read about current
events in the news, and my heart will start beating
(15:08):
rapidly and I'll go, oh, this is is there something wrong?
Do I need to go see my doctor? And I
realized it's anxiety. It's it's not normal, but I'm having
a normal anxious reaction to the things that I'm reading about. Right,
But then my thought is like, oh, what if I
have a heart attack? You know. So this is kind
of along those lines where the ideas that we misinterpret
(15:30):
these random bodily sensations as being dangerous. Okay. So their
studies finding was that yes, more sensitivity to anxiety was
related to the frequency of the urge to jump, especially
in people who had never experienced suicidal thoughts. They also
interpreted this as people without a history of suicidal thoughts
(15:54):
as being more sensitive to bodily cues that they could misinterpret.
So that's interesting. So if you've never et suicidal thoughts,
they're saying you're more likely to interpret say like your
heart beating faster as as something of danger. It's interesting. Yeah,
I mean, it's kind of like if you if you've
ever had an anxiety attack, if you if you have,
(16:16):
if you have one and they're rare, then the first
time you have one, it can be extremely alarmente. If
you think, oh goodness, I'm about to die now. So
the study ultimately translates as follows, people with high anxiety
sensitivity were more likely to have higher chances of suicidal thoughts. Okay,
that makes sense. So if you're sensitive to the bodily
(16:38):
reactions and you're worried about being anxious, then you're more
likely to have suicidal thoughts. But subsequently, you were also
more likely to report experiencing this call of the void phenomenon.
So that's interesting. Why do we experience this though Like?
Where is this coming from? Well, let's take a quick
break and we come back. We'll dive into that very question.
(17:05):
All right, we're back. So one theory about this call
of the void phenomenon or the idea of high place phenomenon,
is that there's something going on with a temporary uncoupling
of our different perceptual systems in our brains. It's kind
of like cognitive dissonance. Yeah. Yeah, the idea, and this
comes up comes up all the time on the podcast,
(17:26):
the idea that you have two different ideas, two different
inclinations in your mind, and they conflict with each other.
So the classic, the easy one to go to here,
of course, is oh, I I think homosexuality is wrong,
but I have homosexual thoughts in my head. These two
do not go with one another, um and this generates
it's kind of a friction in the mind exactly. So
(17:49):
their theory was that when you're standing on the edge
of a skyscraper, your brain has fast fear circuitry, that's
what they called it. Obviously it's not circuitry that and
this may alert you of danger, just the danger of hey,
you could fall, But then our perceptual system in our
brain is slower than our fear system, and that kicks
(18:11):
in afterwards and it makes you realize there's actually no danger.
So to make sense of the safety signal. Our brain
mixes this up as cognitive dissonance and we assume we
want to jump, which is why people get confused by this.
So this is interesting. So individuals who are experiencing this
are not necessarily suicidal. Instead, it seems to reflect their
(18:34):
sensitivity to internal cues affirming their actual will to live.
So that lines up with what we're saying earlier that
they're sensitive to, like oh, I'm feeling anxious or oh
I'm feeling depressed or whatever, So it makes sense that
they would be more sensitive to their both their fear
system and their perception system. Yeah. I do like how
the main idea here is that you're safe, but you're
(18:57):
still taking in the sensory data says you're not safe.
And I think that we actually get a little bit
of this when we watch a particularly terrifying video like
we've all, especially within the age of go pro. I'm
sure everyone has seen like base jumping, crazy skiing videos,
stuff with great heights, or people climbing up antennas, and
you watch it and you couldn't be more safe watching
(19:21):
it in your you know, living room, in your office,
on your phone or your personal computer. But you feel
a visceral, you know, if it's probably empathic. But also
you're taking in certain sense data about a dangerous environment
and you can't help it feel part of that. Yeah. Yeah,
that's interesting, and I think I'm leaning towards agreeing with
(19:42):
this theory. But let's remember that this study, there's only
one study on this as far as I can tell,
and it isn't conclusive. Um. Their explanation is simply theoretical
and it doesn't have neurological evidence. Uh, the methodology also
has some weak so let's acknowledge those. First of all,
they only used university students, and let's be honest, university
(20:05):
students are not representative of humanity, right right, Yeah, it
tends to be a profile of a very specific socio economic,
racial division of society. Yeah, and the volunteers themselves were confessing, well,
they may have misremembered their experience or even falsely reported it.
So that doesn't mean the studies flawed. It just means
(20:26):
we need more research. Um. So a proposal for this
is to actually conduct an experiment where scientists would have
to take subjects and position them at different heights to
test at what elevation they begin having the thought to jump. Um,
there's another explanation that goes along I think with what
you were saying about the watching those videos, which is
(20:49):
that it could simply be connected to our thrill of
not buckling under fear, which is a kind of cognitive dissonance. Um,
this is the same reason why we go to haunted houses, right,
both real and uh, you know, fun haunted houses. But
like think about like when you're a little kid, uh
and somebody says, let's go that house over there is haunted,
(21:11):
I dare you to go into it, Right, It's kind
of the same vibe. Uh. And then subsequently you go
to something like I don't know, our version is another
world here in Atlanta. You go to that you know
somebody's going to jump out with a fake chainsaw and
try to scare you. But the thrill of overcoming that
fear is part of why you go and pay money
to do it. Yeah, I mean, it fills you with endorphins.
(21:31):
You're you're very much living in the moment. People who
aren't into meditation or yoga, they still might go to
a haunted house or watch a scary movie, and that's
that's kind of meditative in a sense. It puts you
in the now. Yeah, it's It's probably another reason why
jump scares are so successful in horror films. There's an
addiction to it. Yeah, And it's simple and it works,
(21:52):
and it ties into our basic evolutionary state to be
on the lookout for the tiger that jumps out of
the grass. Now, there's a no take on all of this,
and it ties in, I think nicely to what you
said about the varying heights. At what height does it
kick in? For my own part, I feel like there
is definitely a difference between any call of the void
(22:15):
that occurs at at lower heights as opposed to like
truly awesome heights like Grand Canyon, cliff Edge type. Total obliteration. Yeah,
total obliteration, I think is the thing because it's such
it's such a it would be such a drastic choice. Okay,
it would be such a choice between life and and
and I don't know. I almost to say death like
(22:37):
puts too much of an atmospheric twist on it, but
more like between being an unding and I think this
is I keep thinking this is the two roads diverge
in a Yellow Woods approach. Um, So in the choose
your own adventure book that is life. We encounter plenty
of working paths, right, but many of these are hardly
choices at all. I mean, on some level, we all
(22:58):
choose whether they're going to go to work this morning
or find a liquor store and drink our purchase in
the woods behind the Yeah. Yeah, I mean for most
of us, a lot of people struggle with that every morning. Well,
some people realistically do. No, I'm not I'm not being sarcastic. Yeah,
but but for many of us, it's not really a choice.
Like the things we do are the things we do.
(23:19):
We have this pattern and there's really this is where
we get into that idea that we're not really making
choices and more if at all. However, there are choices
that are more real than others. Where two paths of
equal weight and possibility are presented, and uh, and what
is weightier than the old to be or not to be?
The choice between being and unbing that stands before us
(23:40):
when we stand at the edge of a great expanse.
So it's not so much that we're tempted, but that
our path choosing brain can't help but engage in one
of its many cognitive superpowers, cognitive superpower that we all
possess and uh and used to thrive. And this is
a chronosthesia, which is also known as mental time to travel.
So this entails our ability to be aware of our
(24:03):
past and future and to envision multiple possible futures before us.
So it's the key to our survival. But it's also
the reason you might listen to NPR in the morning
and mentally time travel to the dawn of the Third
World War. So in that anxiety, yeah, the anxiety, anxiety
comes out and you feel it in your body. So
in that moment in the car listening to NBR, we're
(24:25):
forced to wonder what what we're capable of, what we're
willing to lose to gain. And on some level, it's
kind of like the you know, the scene in the
Old Testament with Abraham raising his dagger up in the
sky and then above his son Isaac, and it's just well,
the hand of the Angel come in time to spare him. Yeah, yeah,
(24:46):
looking to something beyond, which gets into the Freudian aspect. Yeah,
so that's another possible explanation for it. I tend to
feel like we've got some of this definitely a part
of it. But I also think the co native dissonance
argument is also very valid, and it does like we've
talked before on the show about how situations of cognitive
(25:07):
dissonance often lend themselves well to supernatural experience. That's not
to say actual supernatural occurrence, but the experience of something
supernatural to us, especially in our demon possession, exorcism, matter
sism episode, that is hugely tied to cognitive dissonance. Yeah.
And when you get down to it, like the the
idea of of encountering the choice between being and un being,
(25:30):
this this kind of panicky pondering over to what extent
you have free willed, to what extent you have control
over your fate? I mean that is that's pretty supernatural
sounding to me. Yeah. Yeah, Well this is a good
opportunity for us to get into a guy who, let's
be honest, in some situations, was quasi supernatural. Uh and
(25:52):
his name was Sigmund Freud. Uh So Freud after a
lot of his better known principles, Uh connected this to
all the phenomenon to an idea that sometimes is referred
to as a death wish, although that just calls to
mind Charles Bronson for me, but it is referred to
(26:14):
as the death drive, articulated in his ninety essay Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, and this describes a drive in all
of us towards self destruction and a return to the inorganic. Now,
I used a paper by Joanne Faulkner on the subject
(26:34):
to sort of see unpackaged this. Now. She argues that
the death drive is when Freud departs from scientific methodology entirely,
and it articulates what he thought of as higher functions
in the psyche that weren't necessarily empirical. Okay, so this
is why I say, like, we're getting into supernatural territory here.
(26:58):
Freud thought this was beyond sciences. Um, it's highly speculative
and it's not grounded in scientific perspective. But Freud's idea
was that the death drive circumvented our pleasure in an
effort to undo a person as an organic whole, and
so as such it gave us both pleasure and discomfort.
(27:21):
I can sort of see where he's coming from here
based on what we were previously talking about with like,
I don't know, scares right, Like it's both pleasurable and uncomfortable.
But his idea, of course, being Freud, there has to
be this model framework so that everything fits within. And
it was that the death drive was the opposite of
(27:41):
what he called the life drive or the libido. And
while the libido attaches itself to others and creates ties
of affection, the death drive destroys relationships and strives for disintegration.
So if the libido manifests insects, the death drive manifests
in aggression, and if this is directed inward, it could
(28:03):
result in suicide. But here's the thing. Does the death
drive lead to what we today understand as depression? Right?
Like Freud didn't really have a grasp on that the
way we do now. It's possible if it's directed inward,
I guess. But in fact, some Eastern philosophy indicates that
self centered acts maybe a form of this kind of
(28:26):
self destruction, That selfishness itself isolates us from others, leads
us to not having support. So maybe there's a little
bit of a connection between depression and death drive. I
don't know. I'm not a pcent on board with this.
I see how it could sort of make sense at
the time, and it's connected to thoughts that we're having.
(28:46):
But huh, what is interesting you mentioned the Eastern philosophies.
It is interesting to think of self destruction perhaps is
it's not merely well, let's say, to to take self
destruction and think of it in terms of of of
the of of the wheel of sam Sara and the
different states, and the idea that you know, you're reincarnated
into two upper and lower forms. Yeah. One of the
(29:08):
realms is that of the hungry ghosts, where one is
just you know, constantly grasping for something and and and
unable to to fill yourself with it. And and there's
another realm, which is more of the hell room. And
this is where I feel like things really line up
with this idea of death drive just this you know,
rageful uh, you know, assault on the things that anger you.
(29:29):
I can give you like a personal version of this
that I experienced. And this might be a little bit
t m I, but um I often I'm compelled by
the urge to just go be somewhere in complete isolation.
Like I think when I when I have this urge,
it's like, oh, I like a like a rundown motel
(29:51):
in the middle of nowhere, off of a highway somewhere, right,
and I'll just sitting there for a week, Like there's
something about that that's just very compelling to me. And
I don't want to destroy myself. I don't want to
commit suicide, but there's something about it that that draws
me there, right, And I think based on what you're
(30:12):
talking about here, there's a similar idea here, right, Like
if you believe in reincarnation and you think to yourself, well,
if I die, I'm going to be reincarnated, possibly as
a lower life form. Right, there's something kind of zen
about that, right, There's something kind of relaxing about the
idea of like I'll come back as a toad. Let's
(30:32):
just live life as a toad, and I won't have
as many concerns to bear. It's true, yeah, now, But
I like this idea that you brought up here too
because it also brings to mind like what each of
us are. So we're certainly we're an organism that's that's alive.
We're also an organism that's is generally moving in various
uh social shares, and you have all of these kind
(30:54):
of like invisible spider webs of social obligation all around us,
and so to do to walk away from all of
that first, say a week and go to this cabin
in the woods. You are not necessarily destroying yourself, but
you might be doing damage to these various social spider
webs that are that have bound you up totally. And
(31:15):
I can see where it would be at once liberating
to walk away from all of those, uh, and then
but then at the same time many would argue, well,
that is self destructive. You were doing damage to these
social structures that had helped maintain you. Yeah, exactly, Yeah,
And that's compelling to write. The pop culture example of
(31:35):
this that drew me in the most, And my wife
immediately recognized it when we saw this, and she's like,
you love this, don't you was And spoilers for this
TV show if you don't want to, you might learn
something you don't want to know about Breaking Bad here.
But in Breaking Bad, there's a point where the main
character it goes in hiding to New Hampshire for a
(31:58):
year and he just lives in if small cottage with
nothing but like you know, canned food and newspapers for
a year and he just sits there and thinks on
what he's done and sleeps and eats and is he
just is and he's entrapped by snow when we find him.
And I saw it, and I was just like, oh God,
(32:19):
that that seems like the best vacation ever to me.
But at the cost of all of his social relationships,
which is sort of the point in the show. Uh.
You know, this reminds me a lot of a Warren
Zevon song that also when I when I have this feeling,
I'll play this song and listen to it. It's called
Splendid Isolation. It's great because the lyrics are basically rolling
(32:42):
through these three different through or four different scenarios that
he is craving, like I want to live on the
Upper east Side and never go down in the street,
you know, put tinfoil up on the window. I want
to live in the desert like Georgia O'Keefe. You know,
he's doing scenarios where um, we're we're Waren is talking
about just walking away from everything and just encapsulating himself
(33:04):
in uh in in in total isolation and and ultimately
kind of self destructive self centeredness, because he ends up
like making comparisons to to Neverland Ranch interesting, you know,
locking yourself up in your own private Disney sort of thing. Well,
I never put tinfoil on my window, but in my
(33:24):
twenties I have to admit, Uh, I took cardboard and
nailed it up over all the windows in my bedroom
just because, like I wanted complete and utter darkness in there.
Did you have a black light poster? No? No, I
didn't missed opportunities mushroom wizards. Well, back to this Freud thing,
(33:48):
I think it reeks of the subjective. It's a little
bit of magical thinking, which is fun, but most people
in this realm, in this discipline think of it as
being eccentric. Regardless, it does apply to depression. If you
understand that there's an innate voice that wishes for death
and destruction, well that's that's helpful, right At least in
(34:11):
therapy you can help separate that and distance yourself from
those thoughts, and that takes away their power and allows
you to challenge them and minimize them and disregard them.
So there's something to that. People who have just like
outright dismissed Freud. I'm sort of in the middle, Like,
I don't buy it a hundred percent of the time,
(34:32):
but I do think that there's some value and that
he helped the profession sort of edge along slowly. Yeah,
I mean I I always come back to my my
lens analogy, where what I what I want to walk
around with with the Freud lens in place all the time,
with my Freud goggles on all the time. No, I
would not, but I do find it as helpful in
(34:52):
varying scenarios to pull the the Freud lens down over
my own vision, of my own worldview and think, oh, well,
how might the supply to the current scenario, What does what?
How does Freud illuminate what's going on here? Well, why
don't we take a quick break, and when we come back,
we're going to delve into some actual statistics about suicidal
(35:13):
thinking that may help us unraveled this call of the
void phenomenon a little more. Alright, we're back. So when
mental health professionals refer to these call of the void moments,
they usually call it suicidal ideation. But that term seems
(35:35):
broad for our purposes here today, So let's let's try
to separate out what the difference might be. Okay. In eleven,
the c d C conducted a really big study examining
statistics about suicide, suicidal thinking, uh, and um, suicidal preparation,
and they found that three point seven percent of adults
(35:57):
in the United States had had suicidal thoughts in just
the last year. Now, let's put that into perspective. That's
eight point three million people. That's a lot of people.
Other studies have placed this even higher, saying that it's
actually around eight to ten of the population. Now let's
(36:17):
look at the previous study on the high place phenomenon.
That's not even close to the thirty to fifty percent
of people who reported that they had experienced that phenomenon. Right,
So it seems like what we think of as suicidal
ideation and and high place phenomenon or call of the void,
those are different. It seems like it suggests that there's
(36:39):
there's some kind of different thought process going on there. Yeah,
And of course with all of this, it depends on
exactly how you're phrasing the question and how the individual
on the other end views suicidal thoughts, uh, etcetera. I mean,
because the big thing is like, what does that individual's
culture say about suicide? Yeah, Now, even there there's this
(36:59):
is the kind of thing that we would have to
bust out in a longer episode. But even within the
United States, that you're going to have varying subsets of
people that are going to have different ideas about suicide. Yeah,
and that actually plays in these statistics as well. Uh
In the c d C report, they actually summarize the
data on ninety two thousand, two hundred and sixty four respondents.
(37:22):
But this establishes a difference between having suicidal thoughts and
actually making plans for a suicide or attempting it. Plans
and attempts are very different from just thinking about it. Okay,
The estimates vary based on a couple of things, sociodemographic
factors as well as the region of the country that
(37:43):
you live in. So what you're just saying, here we go.
Suicidal thoughts were higher among young adults between the ages
of eighteen to twenty nine than they were for people
over thirty. It was also significantly higher for women. In general.
Non Hispanic Whites were the group with the highest prevalence
of suicidal thoughts, while non Hispanic Asians were the group
(38:05):
with the lowest suicidal thoughts. And regional factors, this is
really complicated, but they think it could be related to
indicators such as divorce rates or resources to access like healthcare. Uh,
and so the cause and effect relationship here is unknown,
but there's a there's a couple of things like, for instance,
(38:27):
adults with less than a high school education and those
who are unemployed at the time were more likely to
have these thoughts. Finally, those in the Midwest and the
West were more likely to have suicidal thoughts than those
in the Northeast in the South. Now, I don't know
how to unpack that, but what you presented sounds sounds close,
(38:49):
which is that like, various cultures have different beliefs about suicide, right,
and and or like they said that, there's like real
world factors like how much access they have to healthcare
or or or do they have a job, things like that.
So there's limitations to this accounting though that we should
note as well. For instance, previous studies indicate that adults,
(39:11):
when they're talking about suicidal thoughts, they under report, especially
when they're talking about when they were adolescents. So if
they're adults now and they're saying, well, when I was
an adolescent, this is you know, this is how often
I experienced that they're they're known to under report. That
makes sense to me, Yeah, I mean, I mean you're
a different person when you're adult when you're an adolescent,
(39:32):
So you're really kind of teasing apart the thoughts and
motivations of a different you entire So I can see
where there might be a tendency to say, oh, well
that that that twenty year old me, that eighteen year
old me. You didn't know what you're talking about now,
even serious about that. And this study also didn't account
for a couple of populations. Uh, first of all, institutionalized populations,
(39:54):
which would probably have I mean, we would assume would
have a higher rate of thinking about suicide. It and
it totally cut out any kind of Native American populations.
So and that wasn't like on purpose, it was just
because they didn't have access to enough evidence. Yeah, I
think there is a large factor here that comes down
to is suicide an open pathway to this individual? Is
(40:18):
it at all socially acceptable? To what degree is it
socially acceptable? And that is going to be governed by
your culture, your history. Indeed, what what books and movies,
what beats of bits of fiction you you you value,
But these are all going to help to skew this
idea of of whether or not suicide is a practical
(40:42):
option for an individual. Yeah, but very different from the
idea of standing on a ledge and looking and just
kind of getting that urge to je right. So that's
why I put these statistics in here to sort of
just give you like, these are very different things, and
we can see the statistical differences just between these two studies.
(41:03):
It's also worth remembering all of this stuff for both
studies is self reported, and that is not a reliable
Now to sort of pull out of the gloomier aspects
of this this topic, um, I will ask everyone to
to think about the call of the void. You know, uh,
the situation in which the gravity of disastrous choices. You know,
(41:25):
it's not merely anxiety inducing or or threatening to one
sense of self control, but it is exhilarating. It's it's
it's sort of endorphin pumping high that want to achieves
from skydiving or even less dangerous smaller acts. And and
plus what is the true call of the void but
but a contemplation, however unformed of oblivion, a complete emptying
(41:47):
of self, not merely hearing the call of the void,
but but kind of touching the void, having almost a
spiritual moment. To go back to that quote from Call
of the Wild again, you know something that is at
once splendid and terrible. Yeah, And so, as we've been
doing in some of our episodes recently, we want to
make sure if you heard this and this like touched
upon something for you, and and you were hearing these
(42:09):
statistics or whatever and you thought, well, this this resonates
within me and I'm a little concerned. There's actually a
nonprofit that we would like to throw a line out too,
so that you, in case you're feeling that way, have
some support. And it's the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Uh.
It's a support line. It's seven, it's free, it's totally confidential.
(42:33):
It's for people who are in distress. Uh. And it
helps prevent crises and provides resources for you and your
loved ones. So maybe it's not you, maybe it's somebody
you know. Uh. So the number for that is one
eight hundred two seven three eight to five five. Again,
it's one eight hundred two seven three eight two five five.
(42:57):
All right, and hey, if you want to hear more
at the pisodes of stuff to blow your mind. If
you want to check out videos, blog post, you name
it links out to our social media accounts, head on
over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's right,
and I want to hear from you the audience. Have
you experienced the call of a void? Have you thought
about jumping off a tall building or the Grand Canyon
(43:17):
or maybe even onto a train track before, but of
course you didn't want to. You just got mixed up
with these feelings inside. That's that's basically how we all
feel nowadays. I'm just so mixed up with these feelings inside. Uh,
let us know. You can let us know on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
or Instagram, or you can write us at blow the
Mind at how stuff works dot com. And it close
(43:39):
out here today. I'm just gonna read another quote. This
one comes from a book by Robert Graves. A number
of you may be familiar with him from his more
popular work such as I Claudius, but he also wrote
a book called Goodbye to All That, and he talks
about the Great Four. He talks about mountain climbing, and
this is just a quick quote where he talks about climbing.
My worst climb was on a little wit the most
(44:00):
formidable of the precipices, when at a point that needed
most concentration, a raven circled round the party in great sweeps.
I found this curiously unsettling, because one climbs only up
and down or sideways, and the ravens seem to be
suggesting diverse other possible dimensions of movement, tempting us to
(44:21):
let go our hold and join him. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, is it how stuff
works dot Com? No,
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