Anyone afraid of heights?

[Bill Hollinger]

Anyone afraid of heights? WTF???

http://edge.liveleak.com/80281E/u/u/...0365%26embed=1

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[Harlan (Deceased)]

I am deathly afraid of hieghts! I watched that video before, and it brought it back to me -
I spent a summer break in college working for my uncle putting up a ten story building. He owned a crane company and I had to straddle the ball on the crane every morning to be lifted up to where we stood on planks around the steel frame of the building. No safety harnesses or anything back then and I was so scared every day I was completely exhausted by the time I got home. More from being scared than physical work, and after three months I was still scared of heights.

The heights while flying airplanes doesn't have any effect on me at all and I love being up there, but I still get that awful panic feeling just looking over a railing from a high place.

[jamie5070]

I don't care for them unless i've got a really good rope to hang on to. I think it has to do with thye direct perspective with the ground. I love flying. One of the most stomack churning things I remember as a kid was going up in the St. Louise Arch. It's been 35 + years and I still remember how the elevator would cant and clunk as it repositioned its self on the way up. And then there is the LEANING out to look down throughthe slanted windows.
john

[browningautorifle]

I used to do a lot of mountaineering in the army. Like Harlan we never used ropes or security(we the instructors) and climbed like spiders. It gave the students confidence in us... Something has changed over the years however, as I crossed a local bridge in Vancouver and looked down I couldn't help the feeling of dread that overcame me. Sad what time does.

[Patrick Chadwick]

I think it has to do with thye direct perspective with the ground.

It has. I remember a 1960s edition of Scientific American which had a report of an experiment with kittens. The researchers placed the kittens on a transparent perspex plate on top of a chessboard pattern. The kittens ran all over the place. Then the chessboard was split, so that one half was a foot or so below the top half. The face of the drop was also checkered, so the kittens could see the perspective when they put their heads over the edge. The kittens would not cross the line where the drop started, although, of course, it would have been perfectly safe on the perspex plate. Even though their sense of touch (in the paws) said it was OK, the optical sense said DANGER.

Then the researchers removed the board with the drop, and replaced it with a board that was at one level, but with the pattern made so that it looked as if there was a drop, i.e. a sharp perspective change halfway across the board from large squares to small squares. And again the kittens refused to go into that area. The optical impression overrode the sense of touch - every time.

Patrick

[enfield303t]

I feel uncomfortable with heights and seems to be a greater problem now that I am old.. Hard to believe that when I did 9 parachute jumps before I compressed a vertebrae/broke my ankle and had to quit.


Totally different feeling when I had a chute on my back, mind you young and invincible at that age.

[frankderrico]

Height's never bothered me until I fell off a ladder from about 6' and broke an arm and by the doctors count "at least 3 ribs".
A couple years ago I had the urge to jump again and did 10 skydives, one from 10,000 feet. That didn't bother me at all.
Last week I was up on a ladder and felt the feeling of sweat and nerves.
Go figure.....Frank

enfield303t, know excactly what you mean (young and bullet proof).....Frank

[old crow]

For me, even visualizing being at height gives me a 'squeeze' in the gonads - something that no one else has mentioned as a fear reaction - just watching this video gave me that same 'squeeze' every time the camera panned downward. Sloped heights don't bother me; its just the truly vertical drops that bother me and I've sat in the I.P. seat in B-52s during stall maneuvers watching the sky become terrain and that never bothered me even though I had no parachute for fall-back but put me on the edge of a canyon wall and there goes that 'squeeze' again.

[Harlan (Deceased)]

That's about the best way to describe it for me too and it seems to pull all the way into my stomach.
(Just looking over the edge of a guard rail on a building)

I've ridden through aerobatic routines in T-6's and some really hard aerobatics with my buddy who owns a decathlon and nothing of the same feeling ever.

[old crow]

"Cremasteric reflex"; happens rapidly in response to fear, slowly in response to intense cold exposure. Absent in some spine diseases/injuries.