Instant Genius - Inside the brain of a thrill seeker

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

Whether its jumping out of planes or climbing giant mountains, some people live for the thrill. But are their brains different and can you become a thrill seeker? We spoke to Brendan Walker, a thrill engineer and expert in all things exhilarating to find out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit name audio.com to live. learn more. From BBC Science Focus magazine. This is instant genius of bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. I'm Alex Hughes, staff writer for BBC Science Focus. Today we're speaking to Brendan Walker, an engineer who is dedicated to understanding and producing thrilling experiences. Whether it's a surprise birthday party or jumping out of a plane, thrill and excitement make us feel alive. But is frill-seeking genetic? Should we all be trying to seek more danger and is it good for us? Brendan talks us through the science of frill-seeking and explains the personality, genetics and beliefs of the most daring frill seekers out there. So Brendan, you describe yourself

as a frill engineer. What does that actually mean? And how did you come to do that? My interest in the, well, I say it's an emotion of thrill, it's more of a feeling of thrill, comes from having worked in aviation as a military aeronautical engineer. I think I was always intrigued, but I didn't realize, you know, what was going on, that it was the quality of thrill that really excited me most. And obviously, yeah, how I was being thrilled. But I think I started to realize what that quality was. when I was working for the Science Museum, developing exhibits for them for their new

welcome wing back in 2000. As a designer of stuff, an interactive stuff, I started looking into more depth into it. And I wrote a small booklet whilst I was at the Royal College of Art called the Taxonomy of Thrill. And I realised there were some certain qualities of a thrilling experience which related to human physiology and psychology. And it was when the science, Museum invited me back to produce a festival called Thrill Laboratory, which I proposed to them. It was a month of bringing fairground rides into the museum to conduct experiments on people on rides, that I realized that there was a mixture of things going on. There was the subjective nature of thrill and emotions. And then there was the thing I was fascinated in, which was how to

construct things that would elicit those emotions. So the engineering, came in. So really the term thrill engineer captures the subjectivity of emotional experience and also my passion for being able to sort of objectively study it and to create things that can elicit those emotions. So I suppose that was the birth of the thrill engineer. And how do you engineer a thrill even though? What is it that you break down that makes something thrilling? The idea of engineering thrill really starts with the thought of, what's happening in the human body. And if you just look at physiology, so let's not look at inside the body, but what's happening

outside the body? What are we doing when we express thrill? There are two aspects. One is there's arousal and there's valence. Valence links to pleasure or the scientists call it the hedonistic tone. It's very much related to dopamine and the reward pathways. And arousal is related to adrenaline and the body being pumped up. and ready for action. And I'd noticed through interviews with 50 people who had gone to all sorts of

lengths to elicit their own thrilling experience, everything from cross-dressing to whitewater rafting to shoplifting, they all said that they'd experienced thrill when there was a rapid and large increase in both their pleasure and their state of arousal. So as a designer, I realized that they are the two qualities of an experience that I want to try and control. If you manage to design an experience that creates a rapid and large increase in pleasure and arousal at the same time, you are guaranteed to be able to create a thrilling experience. And when we say, for example, the phrase adrenaline rush, what does that actually mean? When you break it down, what's going on in the brain and the body? People often associate thrill-seeking with adrenaline junkies. That's been hooked on this

beautiful rush of adrenaline that we get in the body. And that's really, in evolutionary terms, it's when the body gets activated by the release of adrenaline, it's mainly to activate the body's autonomic nervous system. Our hands start, and our feet actually start to produce sweat, which in evolutionary terms is really helpful as a primate. We're swinging through trees, trying to evade danger or to go hunting and to move faster through the trees to catch our prey. Our pupils become dilated, so we're able to receive and assess a greater level of detail. Our heart rate obviously goes up, our breathing goes up,

which as a machine that's fueled by oxygen means that we can do things faster. and there's a kind of a heightened state of awareness in the brain, so our cognitive functioning increases. So adrenaline, you know, and it's quite tiring, you know, to be subjected to adrenaline can be exhausting, but in those short periods of time, we become super receptive to things that are going on around us. And it's exciting. I mean, it's not only exciting, but it is exciting in itself to have that level of adrenaline coursing through us. And we very rarely in the Western world meet the kind of dangers or the things that make us scared that are going to put us into that state of flight or fight. So we will, you know, we absolutely relish going to places like

theme parks to be able to generate those moments to feel what adrenaline really feels like, all in the safety of a theme park setting. And should we be seeking this for real? Is it something that is in a way good for us? Well, thrill seekers, you know, there's one half of it is the adrenaline junkie. The other one is pleasure seekers. And obviously, you see why the scientists call it the hedonistic tone, because we do look rather hedonistic if we're seeking pleasure. We almost look like where, you know, that's a frivolous thing to be doing.

But actually, it's putting those two things together, the dopamine and the adrenaline and this pleasure and arousal. People report feeling truly alive. When you're thrilled, you feel alive. And thrill is the reward of staying alive, proliferating life. It rewards hating hunger, quenching thirst, having great sex, avoiding danger. And yeah, it's when as humans, we feel, or any animal, feels the most alive. And so, yes, it is life affirming to feel thrilled, or rather not to feel, feel thrilled is a rather empty existence. We're not fulfilling our sort of full emotional potential. So I think there's that aspect of it. But also it can be quite cathartic as well. We do know that exercising facing fears, facing challenges, experiencing things that are novel, are expanding our experience of the world and ourselves. So there is a, a, psychological and sort of evolutionary advantage to seeking novelty. And it's those novel experiences

that will elicit thrill. So yeah, we're constantly exploring, pushing the boundaries of what we can do individually or as humanity. And they are the things that motivate and drivers to achieve increasingly greater things in life. And we're talking about these examples of activities. you know, it's things like skydiving or climbing or, you know, something where there's a level of fear in it. But is the way that we process and experience fear different depending on what the activity is? Say, I go skydiving. Is that a different emotional appeal to be running away from a bear or something like that? Yeah, I think we could graph the qualities of pleasure and arousal and also the types of stimuli that you're being exposed to.

I found there are generally five classes of things that can create a throwing experience. The first is the sensational. So obviously there's the onslaught of all the senses. And obviously our vestibular system being the one that helps us most to detect movement. So there's that sort of classification. There's the spectacular. So it's sort of magic, fireworks, things that seem not possible and challenge our belief systems. there's power and control.

So there's basically either losing power and control and regaining it. And then there's an area to do with social value. So when you're skydiving, are you going to land to the fantastic sort of rapturous applause of an audience or loved ones? I mean, that's in itself can be very thrilling. And then there's life and death. There's evading mortality or morbidity is quite thrilling. So any experience that I'm designing or studying can have all five of those different mechanisms at play.

But then there's also the sort of the elephant in the room, which is our perception of risk. So unfortunately, with every novelty, let's say I would love to be confronted by a bear, but there is the danger, as we all know, that we might die in such an encounter. So there's constantly this struggle that our perception of the danger, danger quite often will outweigh or rather tell us not to go ahead with that novel thing, which we know in essence would be quite thrilling. So there are these kind of mitigating factors which make every encounter quite different. And also you as an individual. So your personality will be quite different to somebody else's. There was some great work done by

Marvin Zuckerman, who I think is the great grandfather of thrill-seeking, he wrote a book on the sensation-seeking scale, a scale, a personality-type scale that he developed. And there are four different dimensions to people's personality. There's the thrill and adventure-seeking scale, which is, do you like, well, the classic kind of adrenaline-junky-type sort of seeking activities, very much to do with sort of sports and, you know, active things. Then there's the experience-seeking scale where you'll probably find people who go to the circus or to go and see magic or firework shows would score very highly on that scale. Then there's disinhibition, so people who are very happy to perform in public or scream in a public place on a roller coaster,

they'd score very highly on that scale. And then there's susceptibility to boredom. So some people are a bit twitchy. They won't go to theme parks because they don't want a queue for two hours to get on a ride that only gives them a thrill for three minutes. But actually, you know, a place that Alton Towers do very well for people who score quite low on the susceptibility to boredom scale because that means people are prepared to queue. So it's complex working out, you know, your particular, you know, comparing skydiving to facing a bear, compared to driving quickly in a car, to doing the loops in an airplane. They've all got to. all these various different things going on. But generally, you can start to compare things. Once you

understand the variabilities between the things themselves, that are causing the stimulation, and also the personality types, you know, what is it about you that makes you perform differently in a situation compared to me? Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, We roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. It's peak pollination season and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing, I need a phone plan with top priority data speeds. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless.

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Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. You are making me oddly tempted to try and run away from a bear or find a bear. And I don't know if that's just this conversation, but it's seeming like a more positive experience all of a sudden. Well, there's another psychologist, Michael Aptor, who wrote a book called The Dangerous Edge. and it is our fascination with, I think,

teetering at that edge of trying something which is new and feels quite exciting, but also having this little voice inside you're saying, that could be a little bit dangerous, which is why theme parks are great, because they play with the notion of the dangerous edge, because it's all theatre in a theme park. They will make rides feel unsafe,

but there's an unwritten contract when you step through those gates that actually your welfare, your well-being is absolutely the top priority in those environments. And then you can start making believe that the roller coaster is the scariest thing you're ever going to go on, the most dangerous thing. But actually, in your heart of heart, you know that it's safe. So if you did want to experience tangling with a bear, maybe we could design a suit that would make it a safe experience. You know, I suppose it's like diving with sharks. I've been diving with sharks, but actually you were inside a cage.

So you kind of get, but they have big viewing areas where you don't see the bars. So you feel like you're engaging almost directly one-to-one in an unmitigated setting. So there are ways to do that. And, you know, theme parks are the places that are expert at playing with creating those thresholds and managing those types of experiences. And this is something I find quite interesting because there's, you know, we talk about this managed fear, whether it's, it might seem dangerous, but skydiving involves very highly trained instructors, or if you've gone on a roller coaster, there's a lot of steps that've gone into making that safe,

but feel like a scary experience. Is there this idea that you reach a point where you say, okay, this isn't doing it for me anymore, I'm not scared, I know that there's no risk here. And that's when you, you know, you get into the free solo climbing or you get into these deep sea divers who are doing it about protection. And do you reach that level of, okay, remove the barriers I'm going all in? That's a great question. I think sticking with the skydiving analogy, if I were somebody who was going, right, okay, I don't need all these safety barriers anymore.

Yeah, I want to live a little closer to that edge. There was one skydiving experience I had where I didn't have a lot of money in the United States. the hangar I went into, the skydiving instructor was sewing our parachute, making a repair. And the health and safety video was a very grainy VHS with a lawyer saying that you were signing your life away. I mean, talk about building up the anticipation or apprehension. And then we did have an accident. We had to deploy a second shoot because the first one did fail. So I'm thinking, if I was an experienced skydiver, I mean, all the guys were on the ground with my partner at the time were very excited.

because for them, this was beyond the norm, this was going into territory, which they were all trained for, you know, ditching the first parachute, deploying a second parachute. But for me, I'd never been skydiving before. This was way too much. I've never been skydiving ever again since. So I think that idea of finding that threshold and, you know, for one person, what might be new and novel and already like at the limits, for somebody else who's been well trained, they may want to take it to the next level. But I interviewed a skier, a black run scare, a Chris Davenport, who was making films about his black run skiing, you know, first person to be dropped into the Rockies on various ski slopes. And he said, actually, it was all about to the untrained observer,

he looked like he was being foolhardy, he looked like he was embracing risk, but actually he was at a different level, I suppose, a different level of granularity. He understood that threshold so well, he was going, well, look, I can actually take it to the sort of next degree, the next order of magnitude. And it wasn't because he was being foolhardy. It was just because he understood the risks. So he was like now examining that threshold with a microscope. And he would spend two days with a telescope looking at the runs and making sure that he knew his route, etc. So it was setting himself a different challenge. The goalposts had shifted. And I think that's that is what it's all about. And you find people who on roller coasters who've ridden the same

roller coaster for 50 times, 100 times, they start to find pleasure and excitement in different aspects in, well, if they're a bit crazy, they can, as the safety bars come down, some of them put their fists in between the safety bar and themselves. So that there's a little bit of a gap so that when they're actually reaching the top of a ride, they get air time, which means they rattle around a little bit inside their safety. And I don't recommend anybody does that at all, but you see, people do shift the goalposts. They're still doing the same activity, but they're finding ways to make it thrilling for them. And these people who, I mean, in this circumstance, I'm talking about the people that, you know, they're so committed to it,

that this is their life and it's what they do. The Alex Honnold's free-souling, giant mountains, the skier that you talked about, these sort of people, are they wired differently to the average person, or is this just purely a difference in interests and what they like to do? I think there's a whole, there is clearly a nature, nurture aspect to thrill-seeking, and there are many contributing factors. I know that genetics is one factor that can play into this,

so there are certain thrill-seeking types. In fact, I had my genes sequenced in that area and studied, Yeah, there's a gene, D4DR gene that lives on chromosome 11, that if there's a defect in that gene, it's the one that actually processes dopamine and takes it to the brain and delivers and creates the whole reward pathway. If there's a defect, it can't bind to dopamine. So it means that people need to go to greater extremes to create more dopamine to give the D4DR gene a greater chance of binding to it. So you will find people who are thrill seekers. There's one in 30, I think, in the UK. I think the US, I think there's one in 20, people who will have this defect. And that's because places like Australia and the US, which relied on adventurers going to those continents. Clearly, being a thrill seeker lends itself to adventuring and going off to new lands. So you get a greater proportion. If you go to China, about one in 60 have the thrill seeking gene. So you know, you can look at genetic. You can look at personality types, which could be sort of nature nurture. There could be other issues too. So again, I find the people I've interviewed, there's a certain, and I see this when I see

people in the SAS being interviewed as well, there is a very different type of person. And I can't put my finger on it, to be honest. But there is, and I kind of like to say, there's a look in the eyes. and that is all I can put it down to. There is a look in the eyes, both a thirst for life and also something that tells me I wouldn't want to be on the back of a jet ski with them. Not very scientific, but they feel like a different breed.

Maybe that is the genetics, but I'm not too sure. It's maybe not entirely scientific, but it does sound like a great way to do a quick check. Just to look them in the eye and then you know. I think that's absolutely it. Look them in the eye, talk about doing something exciting and just see their response. If there's that twinkle in their eye, you think you're the kind of person who's going to take it up to the match without asking for permission, aren't you? Yeah, you'll get a taxi. Maybe taxi and save a lift with them.

Yeah, exactly. Yes, yes. And do these people, the ones genetically bound this way or the people that have been doing this their whole life. Is it just this one aspect of their life or is this, you know, that they're more likely to take personal risks in their love life and their personal life for the jobs that they do? Yes, so this is the risk-taking aspect of this and people who've got a low perception of risk, so which in a sense would lend itself to them experiencing things that would appear to be at greater extremes than, let's say, the norm in society. So they may appear to be thrill seekers, but in fact, they are only pushing to their own personal limits.

And I often say that, you know, if I could be thrilled just by a surprise birthday party, and that to me was almost too extreme. I don't like surprises, for example, and a surprise birthday party is the max that I could really do. I don't have to do black run skis, ski slopes. What a fantastic life that would be, because you would be experiencing the, the same level of thrill as somebody else who has to do something which feels completely risky and completely out on a limb and incredibly expensive to do as well. So for me, when I'm performing my research, I look with rose-tinted glasses at the people at the other end of the spectrum

who can get their thrills from much simpler means. But those people who are, you know, at the other end of the spectrum, I think it's their perception of risk, which is the key. factor that by managing that perception of risk, and it either might be because they are foolhardy, or they've got like Chris Davenport, the downhill skier, who would go to great lengths to understand the risks associated with those situations. Same with guys in the SAS, either by superfrequency of exposure to dangers, so they understand the nature of it, they understand how they respond in those situations, no longer novel. So again, the perception of risk lowers. Or it's because they just know how to manage risk. I think that is the key factor that differentiates

what we assume to be a thrill seeker from somebody who appears to be, well, much more within the norms of everyday life. I think it's that management of perception of risk. So one man's surprise birthday party is another man skydiving. Absolutely, yes. That's what we're taking from this. That's exactly it, yeah. And I'd like to be the person who can get their thrills from a surprise birthday party any day. The other thing that I'm curious about is whether there's this, I guess, a link between age and thrill-seeking.

You know, people tend to talk about being younger and more willing to take risks in life. Does that go as you get older? Or if you're a thrill-seeker, is this just, well, this is my life now? Yeah, there's a great photograph that Marvin Zuckerman had in his book showing, him on a ride at age 75 with his grandchild who was maybe five or six years old. And I think it was on a ride at Disneyland. There's a certain trajectory in our thrill-seeking behavior, which is very much linked to age. We reach the maximum of our thirst for novelty when we're between, I think, 16 and 21 years old. And also it's when our perception of risk is the lowest because we're

trying to learn about the world. We are no longer, you know, we're young adults. We're now doing things, you know, we have agents in the world. We're getting to experiment. So we're building up our knowledge of the world. By the time we reach 21, we suddenly realize there's quite a lot of dangerous things we could be doing. So your perceptive risk goes up, but also there's certain things about seeking novelty when you're young, which is very much to do with becoming an adult and exploring the world. But then you find that as you get older and your thirst for novelty and sensation seeking starts to drop off as you getting to an older age, which is great. So you could be thrilled by simpler things, a surprise birthday party. But also your perception

of risk also increase quite sensibly because you become frailer, less likely to be able to bounce back. And so there's this sweet spot where I think grandchildren and grandparents are appreciating the same things in life. So I think it's no surprise to me when you hear that grandparents are great with grandchildren, but they weren't so great with their own children because they're in a similar place in life. One's on the ascendance, the other one's on the descendants,

but who cares? In that moment, you've got something in common. The best way to sort of conclude all of this is the question of whether or not you can learn to be more of a thrill-seeker. If you jump off enough cliffs, will the fear eventually go? Oh, that is a really tough question. I think there is, right, if we're thinking about thrill as far as embracing something, elements that are scary, then I think repeat exposure, or let's say increasing limits is a good way. So, yeah, jump off the side of the pool, then on the one meter board, then the three meter board, and build up a kind of tolerance. But then the question is, well, why do you need to go off the very, tallest board. Well, there's elements to do with the sensation of free fall. There's the idea of spectators applauding you for doing something which appears to be quite brave. So there's a whole host of reasons why we go to the maximum, you know, to the superlatives of the biggest, the highest,

the fastest. And being able to get to those limits safely is good. So practice. Yes, you can practice to become a thrill seeker. But also I think it's don't always assume that it's the the things that are going to create the most adrenaline are the things that are going to thrill you the most. A modest amount of adrenaline, but a great amount of pleasure can also be key and can catch you off guard. There are some great rides at Alton Towers. I think there's spinball whizzer, which is a very tame roller coaster, but the car itself spins around and you don't know which direction you're going to be going down, you know, facing when you're going down as float. Go on that ride with the right person who loves laughing, who loves screaming. And together,

you will have the biggest thrill of any ride on the park. And this is something I tell people time and time again. It's something you can engineer just by being with the right people and making sure that you're smiling and having a great time whilst you're also experiencing that adrenaline rush. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. That was Brendan Walker talking about the science of thrill-seeking. The Instant Genius podcast is brought

to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French, specialist vocal, Name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.