– Why do we scream when something painful happens to us?
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Most animals signal when they’re hurt. It’s a survival trait because it can scare away a predator which hurt you, summon help, or (for group survival) warn others away. In humans, it mostly summons help, because we’re very group-oriented. In some other animals, like deer, it usually causes the rest of the group to scatter, so most of them survive.
For things like hitting our thumb with a hammer, we still react with a scream because our basic instincts don’t differentiate between damage from a bite or from a hammer. They just go right from pain to scream. And, for some reason we don’t totally understand yet, screaming also seems to reduce the amount of pain we feel.
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