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Viliam_Bur comments on Why do people ____? - Less Wrong Discussion
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It's just an evolutionary ad-hoc story, but I think that in an ancient environment you would have real fights sometimes. An impulse to imagine fighting, even when you are not, is an opportunity to rehearse the techniques and learn from mistakes.
I remember reading some article that if some skill requires N hours of time, imagining the practice realistically with full attention, is almost as good as the real practice. This probably assumes that you had the real practice before, so your imagination is realistic enough. In ancient environment, your imagination of fight would be realistic enough.
It is my observation that people seldom have very realistic ideas about what's involved in a fight unless they have some training or hands-on experience. Scenarios like that don't really have a lot of bearing on practical technique, so I'd be rather surprised if this emotional experience were best explained by there being a brain-module that rehearses hypothetical fights instinctively to increase people's odds. It seems like a logical implication would be that people with this trait fare better in physical competition, and if it's a standard trait of humans, then why are we so abysmal at instinctive combat?