Recently I did something stupid – I dropped a motorbike on my foot (not on purpose, of course – this was one of those embarrassing accidents where my foot slipped in an entirely simple and harmless situation). When it happend it was immensely painfull. Usually I suffer pain silently, or rather I get on everybodies nerves by telling them in a pathetic little voice how I suffer my pain silently, but this time I screamed for help – completly pointless, since I could see that my friend (whose bike I was riding, actually) was already coming for help as fast a he could. Somehow I seemed convinced that he would come even faster if I would only scream loud enough. It was only after the first shock wore off that I realized I could wriggle my foot free from under the bike. Hadn’t I spent the first minutes after the accident screaming the pain would have ended a lot sooner.
Now I wonder what’s the point of that reaction. I guess all that adrenaline and stuff served some purpose (maybe to make the pain bearable, altough it certainly didn’t feel that way), but what exactly is the survival value of a response that turns me into a headless chicken with all the wrong instincts [1] ?