Hello, Thrill Seekers!

Here's a cool article from the NY Times emailed me by Diabolique. If you enjoy taking personality tests--I know I do!--then here's a link where you can take one to determine just how much of a thrill-seeker you are.

Enjoy! And keep those dopamine levels elevated!

The New York Times

June 20, 2005

What's the Lure of the Edge?

By RICHARD A. FRIEDMAN, M.D.

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, a k a 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.

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