THRILLS; What's the Lure of the Edge? The Answer Is All in Their Heads
Jun 20, 2005
THRILLS; What's the Lure of the Edge? The Answer Is All in Their Heads
DURING a vacation last winter, I took a zip-line canopy tour of the Costa Rican rain forest. Strapped into a harness 100 feet above the jungle floor, I was flying through the air, with the toucans and parrots, attached to a steel cable strung between two platforms. I was having far too much fun to think that this could be dangerous. At first it was pretty thrilling, but by the 10th zip line I felt it was losing its charge.
On the last and highest platform, a guy just in front of me began to hyperventilate. Being a psychiatrist, I realized he was having a panic attack. I got him to relax with some deep breathing and then asked him whether he had had this problem before. ''Oh, yes,'' he said. ''I thought this would be a way to conquer my fear of heights.''
Why was he terrified by what was beginning to bore me? We were both members of the sex that studies and more informal surveys indicate is more drawn to thrill seeking (for better or worse -- more men than women have orbited the earth, while men are two to three more times likely to be pathological gamblers). But this man and I seemed to be on opposite ends of the thrill-seeking spectrum.
On an individual level, the difference seems to be hard-wired in our brains, scientists have begun to discover. What is more surprising is that thrill seeking appears to be enjoyed not just by an elite -- or, as some think, aberrant -- bunch of people who put their lives at peril for a jolt of excitement.
The focus of research on a relatively small, though dramatic, group of unsavory characters like psychopaths and drug addicts can give the impression that thrill is only for the mentally unbalanced. Far from it. Thrill seeking in one form or another is so widespread that it has practically become institutionalized in the culture. From reality TV shows like ''Fear Factor,'' shot through with danger and risk, to the growing popularity of extreme sports, there is something to suit everyone's taste.
The root of the thrill-seeking experience lies in an ancient neural circuit buried deep inside the brain that is intimately involved in pleasure, reward and novelty seeking. This system, which connects our thinking cortex with our more primitive limbic emotional center, runs on dopamine, a neurotransmitter. Many of life's greatest pleasures feel good because, in the end, they cause the release of dopamine from the brain's reward pathway. Sex, food and recreational drugs all flood the brain with dopamine -- and so does thrill seeking.
Like just about every other human attribute, there is great variation in individual taste for novelty and thrill seeking, much of it rooted in the brain. For example, Dr. Nora Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse has shown that response to euphoria-producing drugs is related to the levels of brain dopamine receptors.
In one experiment, she gave normal male controls intravenous Ritalin, which releases dopamine, and found that those who experienced the drug as pleasant had significantly fewer dopamine receptors than participants who reported unpleasant effects. Those with more dopamine receptors at baseline are probably less likely to abuse drugs or seek any thrill because their brains already have more dopamine activity to start with. In fact, these guys are likely to be thrill-averse, like that fellow I met on the zip line.
For the chronically underaroused, a simple bike ride or jog in the park doesn't do the trick; it would take something more intense like diving 50 feet into a gorge or snorting cocaine to provide them with enough dopamine for them to feel excited.
An entire industry has emerged in the last decade to satisfy such voracious appetites for thrills. Rich Hopkins, an inveterate surfer, stuntman and extreme sportsman, is president of ThrillSeekers Unlimited, a company he founded in 1992. Clients try anything from skydiving, bungee jumping and paragliding to zip-line or stunt driving. They will even give you the ''fire burn,'' where you are set safely on fire, like a real stuntman. ''When we started, we had around 50 to 75 customers that first year,'' Mr. Hopkins said. ''Now, we routinely take out several hundred people in just one adventure.''
Who are these thrill seekers? About 80 percent are men, Mr. Hopkins said. But the big surprise is that some of the largest clients are corporations and that many participants are men well into their 50's and 60's. ''Instead of a golf holiday, they are sending their employees for an extreme sports adventure and they love it,'' Mr. Hopkins said.
Charles Edwards has been chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma ever since he studied meteorology in college. ''I've been obsessed with tornadoes for the last 15 years,'' he said. ''Every storm is completely different, and you just get this adrenaline rush and try to get as close as possible to them. I've seen houses getting blown apart and cows tossed aside. Just awesome.''
Mr. Edwards was so hooked by the thrill of chasing storms that he created his own company, Cloud 9 Tours, to support his habit, as he called it. ''We take people out during the tornado season here in Oklahoma, from April through August. These guys come back again and again.''
But what about thrill-averse guys? Can they learn to enjoy a little more excitement? If so, would thrilling activity itself change their neural circuitry to make them more like thrill lovers?
Probably not, judging from studies of Dr. Jerome Kagan at Harvard, who has shown that certain temperamental traits you are born with are pretty stable. Using M.R.I. brain scanning, Dr. Carl Schwartz at Harvard recently found that these anxious adults showed greater responses in the amygdala, a brain region that processes fearful and threatening stimuli, to faces of strangers than to familiar faces. In other words, people who like novelty have biologically different brains than cautious folks, and no one knows if experience changes this.
Of course, the surge of dopamine that thrill seekers search out can literally be addicting. The reason is that anything that activates our reward system, whether it's a natural reinforcer like sex, food or a thrilling act, is seen by the brain as something that should be repeated -- over and over. And despite how smart we think we are, our brain can't really distinguish among the activating effects of drugs, thrill or useful behaviors. Even worse, for some people, drugs and thrill are more powerfully self-reinforcing than even food and sex. So the very design of our brain that promotes survival also makes us vulnerable.
Alain Robert, aka Spiderman, is known for climbing skyscrapers without special equipment or a safety net. He recently climbed the Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan, which, standing at 1,670 feet, is the world's tallest building. ''The euphoria when I reach the summit maybe lasts a few hours or days at the most, and then I have to have it again,'' he said. ''I enjoy the risk and to be in control of my fear and have to do it again and again. I cannot stop climbing.''
Not all men get their thrills in such physically spectacular ways as Mr. Robert; some get it from their work.
James Cramer, a founder of TheStreet.com and a financial commentator, used to manage a hedge fund. ''I craved the risk,'' he said. ''I would come to work and if by midday I hadn't made a serious bet, I'd be miserable. The bigger the bet, the better.''
''I got such energy and felt so alive,'' he added, ''I was ecstatic on a daily basis.''
For some, though, there may be more to thrill than only a dopamine rush. ''Guys like extreme sports not just because it's exciting, but because it makes them feel accomplished and more self-confident,'' Mr. Hopkins said.
John Bardes, a freshman at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., who enjoys scaling 50-foot walls, echoed this. ''The wall is a genuine test of your ability and if your muscles can't make it, you fall. It's a way of finding your limits and seeing how far you can push yourself.''
Mr. Bardes, however, is not fearless. ''At first I was nervous, and the higher I went the more anxious I became,'' he said. ''But I got over that. Up there, I feel like I'm alone in my own world and it clears my head.''
Thrill has a dark side, too. In the sexual arena, it can literally be fatal. Men with a strong taste for sexual novelty in the form of multiple partners are at high risk of both getting and spreading H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases as they move from one encounter to the next.
But few forms of thrill are as insidiously destructive as gambling.
Recently, scientists have peered into the brain while people are playing a game that simulates gambling. Dr. Hans Breiter at Harvard had subjects play a computer game of chance in which they either won or lost money, and monitored their brain activity. He found that the prospect of winning money activates the same dopamine reward pathway in the brain as recreational drugs like cocaine do. No wonder gambling is so compelling. This also helps explain why gamblers, like drug addicts, often seem helpless to resist an impulse that brings intense pleasure but can ruin their lives.
Curiously, winning the prize is not what seems to make gambling so thrilling and addictive. Dr. David Zald at Vanderbilt University measured dopamine release in a group of subjects who played a computer game in two different conditions. In the first, subjects selected one of four cards and knew they might win a $1 reward, but didn't know when it might occur. In the second, subjects knew ahead that they were guaranteed to win $1 with every fourth card.
Dr. Zald found a large increase in dopamine activity when winning was unpredictable, but not when the subjects knew what was coming. The implication is that gambling is powerfully addictive precisely because the outcome is uncertain.
Believe it or not, thrill seeking is pretty much a modern phenomenon. Our hominid ancestors did not bungee jump or do any of the silly things that we do these days for thrill. Life back on the savannah was exciting enough on its own, with ferocious predators and an overall lack of amenities.
Nowadays, where the basics like food or a sexual partner are a mouse click away, we don't really need our reward circuit for survival; we are free to use it just for pleasure. (To determine your risk comfort level, you can try a test adapted from the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire at nytimes.com/menshealth.)
With few exceptions, like 9/11, modern life has become so safe and controlled that you have to work at finding a little excitement. In fact, one might predict that as life becomes more predictable, riskier forms of excitement will emerge. Hang gliding off Mount Everest? Antarctic triathlon? There's no telling what's next.
DURING a vacation last winter, I took a zip-line canopy tour of the Costa Rican rain forest. Strapped into a harness 100 feet above the jungle floor, I was flying through the air, with the toucans and parrots, attached to a steel cable strung between two platforms. I was having far too much fun to think that this could be dangerous. At first it was pretty thrilling, but by the 10th zip line I felt it was losing its charge.
On the last and highest platform, a guy just in front of me began to hyperventilate. Being a psychiatrist, I realized he was having a panic attack. I got him to relax with some deep breathing and then asked him whether he had had this problem before. ''Oh, yes,'' he said. ''I thought this would be a way to conquer my fear of heights.''
Why was he terrified by what was beginning to bore me? We were both members of the sex that studies and more informal surveys indicate is more drawn to thrill seeking (for better or worse -- more men than women have orbited the earth, while men are two to three more times likely to be pathological gamblers). But this man and I seemed to be on opposite ends of the thrill-seeking spectrum.
On an individual level, the difference seems to be hard-wired in our brains, scientists have begun to discover. What is more surprising is that thrill seeking appears to be enjoyed not just by an elite -- or, as some think, aberrant -- bunch of people who put their lives at peril for a jolt of excitement.
The focus of research on a relatively small, though dramatic, group of unsavory characters like psychopaths and drug addicts can give the impression that thrill is only for the mentally unbalanced. Far from it. Thrill seeking in one form or another is so widespread that it has practically become institutionalized in the culture. From reality TV shows like ''Fear Factor,'' shot through with danger and risk, to the growing popularity of extreme sports, there is something to suit everyone's taste.
The root of the thrill-seeking experience lies in an ancient neural circuit buried deep inside the brain that is intimately involved in pleasure, reward and novelty seeking. This system, which connects our thinking cortex with our more primitive limbic emotional center, runs on dopamine, a neurotransmitter. Many of life's greatest pleasures feel good because, in the end, they cause the release of dopamine from the brain's reward pathway. Sex, food and recreational drugs all flood the brain with dopamine -- and so does thrill seeking.
Like just about every other human attribute, there is great variation in individual taste for novelty and thrill seeking, much of it rooted in the brain. For example, Dr. Nora Volkow at the National Institute on Drug Abuse has shown that response to euphoria-producing drugs is related to the levels of brain dopamine receptors.
In one experiment, she gave normal male controls intravenous Ritalin, which releases dopamine, and found that those who experienced the drug as pleasant had significantly fewer dopamine receptors than participants who reported unpleasant effects. Those with more dopamine receptors at baseline are probably less likely to abuse drugs or seek any thrill because their brains already have more dopamine activity to start with. In fact, these guys are likely to be thrill-averse, like that fellow I met on the zip line.
For the chronically underaroused, a simple bike ride or jog in the park doesn't do the trick; it would take something more intense like diving 50 feet into a gorge or snorting cocaine to provide them with enough dopamine for them to feel excited.
An entire industry has emerged in the last decade to satisfy such voracious appetites for thrills. Rich Hopkins, an inveterate surfer, stuntman and extreme sportsman, is president of ThrillSeekers Unlimited, a company he founded in 1992. Clients try anything from skydiving, bungee jumping and paragliding to zip-line or stunt driving. They will even give you the ''fire burn,'' where you are set safely on fire, like a real stuntman. ''When we started, we had around 50 to 75 customers that first year,'' Mr. Hopkins said. ''Now, we routinely take out several hundred people in just one adventure.''
Who are these thrill seekers? About 80 percent are men, Mr. Hopkins said. But the big surprise is that some of the largest clients are corporations and that many participants are men well into their 50's and 60's. ''Instead of a golf holiday, they are sending their employees for an extreme sports adventure and they love it,'' Mr. Hopkins said.
Charles Edwards has been chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma ever since he studied meteorology in college. ''I've been obsessed with tornadoes for the last 15 years,'' he said. ''Every storm is completely different, and you just get this adrenaline rush and try to get as close as possible to them. I've seen houses getting blown apart and cows tossed aside. Just awesome.''
Mr. Edwards was so hooked by the thrill of chasing storms that he created his own company, Cloud 9 Tours, to support his habit, as he called it. ''We take people out during the tornado season here in Oklahoma, from April through August. These guys come back again and again.''
But what about thrill-averse guys? Can they learn to enjoy a little more excitement? If so, would thrilling activity itself change their neural circuitry to make them more like thrill lovers?
Probably not, judging from studies of Dr. Jerome Kagan at Harvard, who has shown that certain temperamental traits you are born with are pretty stable. Using M.R.I. brain scanning, Dr. Carl Schwartz at Harvard recently found that these anxious adults showed greater responses in the amygdala, a brain region that processes fearful and threatening stimuli, to faces of strangers than to familiar faces. In other words, people who like novelty have biologically different brains than cautious folks, and no one knows if experience changes this.
Of course, the surge of dopamine that thrill seekers search out can literally be addicting. The reason is that anything that activates our reward system, whether it's a natural reinforcer like sex, food or a thrilling act, is seen by the brain as something that should be repeated -- over and over. And despite how smart we think we are, our brain can't really distinguish among the activating effects of drugs, thrill or useful behaviors. Even worse, for some people, drugs and thrill are more powerfully self-reinforcing than even food and sex. So the very design of our brain that promotes survival also makes us vulnerable.
Alain Robert, aka Spiderman, is known for climbing skyscrapers without special equipment or a safety net. He recently climbed the Taipei 101 Tower in Taiwan, which, standing at 1,670 feet, is the world's tallest building. ''The euphoria when I reach the summit maybe lasts a few hours or days at the most, and then I have to have it again,'' he said. ''I enjoy the risk and to be in control of my fear and have to do it again and again. I cannot stop climbing.''
Not all men get their thrills in such physically spectacular ways as Mr. Robert; some get it from their work.
James Cramer, a founder of TheStreet.com and a financial commentator, used to manage a hedge fund. ''I craved the risk,'' he said. ''I would come to work and if by midday I hadn't made a serious bet, I'd be miserable. The bigger the bet, the better.''
''I got such energy and felt so alive,'' he added, ''I was ecstatic on a daily basis.''
For some, though, there may be more to thrill than only a dopamine rush. ''Guys like extreme sports not just because it's exciting, but because it makes them feel accomplished and more self-confident,'' Mr. Hopkins said.
John Bardes, a freshman at Carleton College in Northfield, Minn., who enjoys scaling 50-foot walls, echoed this. ''The wall is a genuine test of your ability and if your muscles can't make it, you fall. It's a way of finding your limits and seeing how far you can push yourself.''
Mr. Bardes, however, is not fearless. ''At first I was nervous, and the higher I went the more anxious I became,'' he said. ''But I got over that. Up there, I feel like I'm alone in my own world and it clears my head.''
Thrill has a dark side, too. In the sexual arena, it can literally be fatal. Men with a strong taste for sexual novelty in the form of multiple partners are at high risk of both getting and spreading H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted diseases as they move from one encounter to the next.
But few forms of thrill are as insidiously destructive as gambling.
Recently, scientists have peered into the brain while people are playing a game that simulates gambling. Dr. Hans Breiter at Harvard had subjects play a computer game of chance in which they either won or lost money, and monitored their brain activity. He found that the prospect of winning money activates the same dopamine reward pathway in the brain as recreational drugs like cocaine do. No wonder gambling is so compelling. This also helps explain why gamblers, like drug addicts, often seem helpless to resist an impulse that brings intense pleasure but can ruin their lives.
Curiously, winning the prize is not what seems to make gambling so thrilling and addictive. Dr. David Zald at Vanderbilt University measured dopamine release in a group of subjects who played a computer game in two different conditions. In the first, subjects selected one of four cards and knew they might win a $1 reward, but didn't know when it might occur. In the second, subjects knew ahead that they were guaranteed to win $1 with every fourth card.
Dr. Zald found a large increase in dopamine activity when winning was unpredictable, but not when the subjects knew what was coming. The implication is that gambling is powerfully addictive precisely because the outcome is uncertain.
Believe it or not, thrill seeking is pretty much a modern phenomenon. Our hominid ancestors did not bungee jump or do any of the silly things that we do these days for thrill. Life back on the savannah was exciting enough on its own, with ferocious predators and an overall lack of amenities.
Nowadays, where the basics like food or a sexual partner are a mouse click away, we don't really need our reward circuit for survival; we are free to use it just for pleasure. (To determine your risk comfort level, you can try a test adapted from the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire at nytimes.com/menshealth.)
With few exceptions, like 9/11, modern life has become so safe and controlled that you have to work at finding a little excitement. In fact, one might predict that as life becomes more predictable, riskier forms of excitement will emerge. Hang gliding off Mount Everest? Antarctic triathlon? There's no telling what's next.