ElI5: What is the reason our body jumps when we get scared? What does this response actually do to help us?
In: Biology
It’s the flight response. Your body getting flooded with chemicals telling you to run and your muscles react accordingly. It’s not everyone that does this. Personally, I dont jump when I’m startled. I default to wanting to attack it. My offspring have learned not to jump out at me in the dark because i’ve sent them flying before.
My uneducated guess would be, rather than necessarily fight or flight, but related, its a flinch response. Your body naturally knows to withdraw from harm, which is all a flinch is.
Obviously if you touch a hot pan, you whip your hand away. But when you’re startled you don’t have enough information to process exactly what the threat/danger is, so your whole body flinches to cover all bases. But you start to acknowledge what happened and start processing what it is that made you jump straight away. So with a movie jump scare, you flinch from an unknown sudden danger, but immediately process that its a movie jump scare and thats the end of it.
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