For instance, when your team misses a super close shot at scoring, or when you lose a super tense game match by a hair.
There’s a reel of a dad watching a sport game on TV with his infant son. The kid keeps looking at his dad for how to react, and seems to understand what’s happening on the TV. When the team scores a point, the kid throws his hands up into the air and cheers, having seen his dad do that behaviour before.
Then he looks to his dad, who’s got his hands on his head, saying “NO!”. It was the wrong team that scored.
The kid puts his head into his hands, and collapses on the couch in his best imitation of his father.
You have years, perhaps decades, of watching people in your culture do this. So it feels natural for you to do.
Interesting, never thought about that. Now I’m curious how far back we’d need to go in different cultures until we don’t see anyone doing this kind of thing - nowadays I think it’s pretty common around the globe.
I’m pretty sure that’s a learned cultural behavior.
I don’t know, but I like having the name for this be surrender cobra:
Now I just need to find a reason to use this term!
hands-on-head is nature’s helmet
It’s things like this that feel weirdly tragic; that our ancestors went through so much shit that only the ones with weird reflexes to grab their cranium made it. Young enough to have not had kids yet mind you. Other kids reacted in other ways, but they didn’t survive. And so here we are, grabbing our heads when our team doesn’t score, a chromosomal echo of some brutal day in the Kenyan Great Rift Valley…
Because you’re trying to keep your brain from exploding!
