Short Wave - Why A Good Scare Is Sometimes The Right Call

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

This week is our last with Maddie as a host, so we're spending it with a trip down memory lane. The first episode Maddie invites us to relive and enjoy is our first listener question episode on the science behind thrill-seeking. She talks to psychologist Ken Carter about why some people love to get scared.Reach the show by emailing [e-mail] pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey, shortwavers. Emily Kwong here with Maddie Safaya. What's up, Duteroenos? Okay, the time has come. This is officially my last week with Shortwave, and we are celebrating by sharing some of my favorite episodes and memories, plus a brand new episode on Thursday. At a special send-off for our beloved host, Maddie Safia, on Friday. We're going to pull back the curtain to talk about what makes Shortwave,

shortwave, and prove to you that Maddie's not really going anywhere. her spirit is in the very DNA of this show. That's right. Even in the short wave afterlife, I will haunt you. Yeah, like every time a scientist uses a superlative, like the fastest, the greatest, I'll think, is it though? Hmm. Because of you. My job here's done, honestly.

And as a science journalist, I believe the greatest gift you can give someone is fact-checking them. Oh my gosh, I'm going to miss you so much. Okay. So in addition to being the queen of nuance, Maddie is also a science. Science communication clown, safe to say, bringing people in using humor, connection, and surprise. Of course, I didn't know she was going to one day use all of those tactics against me in the name of Shortwave. Emily is referring to one of my favorite memories. This was when we were all together in the before times in the studio.

And we were making our episode on the science of thrill-seeking. Emily, you were talking a big game about love and being scared. So, you know, producers, Brett Hansen, Rebecca Ramirez and I hatched a little plan. It was such a betrayal. Britt hit in the studio for, I don't know, hours before I got there. Days. Days. It was days. We had to deliver her food and water, I think. Okay, I won't spoil exactly what happened, but I saw my life flashed before my eyes this moment. Enjoy everybody.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, everybody. It's Emily Kwong here with Shortwave host, Maddie, Hey-oh. Real quick, before we get started, we just want to say thank you so much to everybody who's been listening to Shorewave so far. Thank you. If you're enjoying the show, do us a favor by leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps us get the show in front of all kinds of new people. Which is what we want. Absolutely.

All right, Maddie. So it's our very first listener question episode. And we're keeping it Halloweeny one more day. Because we do what we want. Yeah. We asked for your Halloween-themed questions. Yes. And we got a lot of awesome questions from you guys.

y'all are weird like good weird a bunch of you wanted to know why people seek out scary situations we're talking haunted houses scary movies puppets it's not scary mattie well quang do you like to be scared i really enjoy being scared you said you liked it i do like it why am i so we did plant our producer brett hanson in the corner hiding to pop up and now emily quang is on the ground honestly that was the best thing we've ever done. All right, moving on. All right. So one person who, like you, also loves scary stuff, is our listener, Charlotte Decker.

Hey, Shortwave. So October is my favorite time of year, and I tend to get into the Halloween spirit by doing things like watching lots of horror films and going to haunted houses. However, it does strike me as kind of counterintuitive to willingly put myself into scary situations for fun. So I was wondering if you would be able to shed some light on what exactly is behind this psychological drive that's shared by myself and others this time of year to willfully scare ourselves as a form of entertainment. Charlotte, great question. Every time I've gone to a haunted corn maze, I've asked myself, why am I doing this? Why am I doing this?

So I went hunting for answers. Okay. And I spoke to Ken Carter, a psychologist who teaches at Oxford College of Emory University. And he's written a book about people who love intense experiences. And my favorite thing about him is that he himself is a big old scaredy cat. I was actually, I don't want to say forced, but I was forced to go to a haunted house for a photo shoot. So you had a great time there, is what I'm saying. We actually didn't go into the haunted house.

We were out in front of the haunted house. and the photographer Kay actually kept telling some of the actors to come out and frighten me. Today on the show, Maddie talks to Ken Carter about why some people are wired to enjoy scary or intense things more than others. All right, Maddie, so what did Ken have to say about Charlotte's question? Okay, so the first thing you told me is that Charlotte is probably a person that's called a high sensation seeker. What's that? Basically, it's people that crave intense experiences that they're willing to take, like, physical or, or social risks to have those experiences.

And how can you tell if someone is a high sensation seeker or not? So there are like four things that kind of factor into that. And that's how much you like really thrilling experiences, like our listener, Charlotte, who likes haunted houses, how much you're willing to seek out new experiences, stuff you've never experienced before, how much you can tolerate boredom and how much you're willing to be like wild and unrestrained. The people that are the high sensation seekers, these are the people who can really, really tame chaos. And there's some physiological traits to them that make that easier for them, actually. Right. So tell me about some of the differences between people like Charlotte who like scary stuff versus people like you who don't like being scared.

Yeah. So you're probably familiar with sort of the fight or flight response. And so cortisol is one of the hormones that's sort of responsible for getting us ready to fight, flee, or freeze in those. situations. I prefer freezing. Yeah, I'm more of a flyer myself. You're a flyer? I'm definitely not going to fight. And if I'm going to fight, I'm going to bite. But keep going. And so what we find is that there are some people that are high sensation seekers, they don't produce that much cortisol in those situations. So we think about them being adrenaline junkies. But what they do produce more of is dopamine, which is that's neurotransmitter that's associated with pleasure. So the folks that like scary stuff have kind of a less of a stress response during the scary stuff and more of a like, this is fun response. Absolutely. Absolutely. And then the low sensations that goes on the other hand, they're producing more cortisol. So they're actually getting their body ready to fight the danger. And they're probably not producing that much dopamine so that they are sort of seeing it as a dangerous kind of thing. There's another sort of layer to it, which is there are two different systems in your body that sort of respond to the things around you. One's called the behavioral inhibition system and the other is the behavioral activation system. And these are sort of like traffic lights that sort of respond to things around you.

The behavioral inhibition system says, oh, this is something that's possibly dangerous and bad and tells you to stop. And the behavior activation system tells you this is something's good, approach it. And people that are high sensation seekers may have overactive or really high approach systems and says, oh, that looks really great. Go towards it. Right. So they're just like green light all the time. Let's do this. Exactly.

Let's do this. And because they're not having as much of an inhibition system, that's the bad, you know, step away from it, they're approaching those things. more often. That makes total sense to me. Cool. Okay. I'm trying to think about, you know, like experiences my own life. Yeah.

So, okay, so I do a lot of like whitewater kayaking, which is, can be very intense. But I find, I like it so much because when I'm in that situation, which can be intense and scary, I feel kind of like it's nice to focus on the one thing. You know what I mean? Like, all I have to think about is not trying to die. in that boat. And I'm also having a lot of fun. Is that real? Oh, yeah. So there's a psychologist, Mikhail Chiximihai, and he talks about the state that people are in, they call up a flow state, where sort of time sort of passes away, and they're sort of focused on the thing that they're doing, and high sensation seekers sort of love to get into that flow state. When you're doing that,

you know, whitewater rafting, it's like your body knows what to do. And so a lot of people feel like a lot of times that these high sensation seekers do these reckless things. Interestingly, sometimes they don't perceive the things that they do as reckless because their bodies telling them that it doesn't feel dangerous. Do we know why this is a thing, like from an evolutionary standpoint or anything like that? You know, we kind of need them. You know, we need them as first responders, right? And so we want people who can save us during certain times.

You want a high sensation seeker in the cockpit of an airplane during an emergency. You do not want someone like me working in an emergency room. I would be overwhelmed with all of the chaos. Luckily, when there are emergencies that happen, training can kick in for a lot of people. But, you know, there are some advantages to having high sensation seekers around us for sure. So, okay, is Charlotte always going to be a thrill seeker or does this change with age? Like, is she going to grow out of this? Yeah.

So what I've been finding is that the research suggests that high sensation seeking tends to peak in adolescence, which probably explains why a lot of the videos that you see online are people in adolescents doing these kinds of things. Yeah. But there are some things that may be environmental that can influence that. There's something that a lot of the people I've been talking to say that I call anchors, which are people that sort of pull them back. from their highest sensation seeking things. And these can be either family members or when people have kids. I talked to one woman that said that she loves going skydiving.

But her husband reminds her that she has kids who would like for them to continue to have a mom and that maybe she shouldn't skydive as much as she would want to. And so those individuals may decide not to do as many of those kinds of things. So, you know, there may be some changes in terms of biological kinds of things that may make people not be as sensation-seeking as they get older biologically and also maybe even sort of environmentally.

This is fascinating. It really is. Thanks for bringing this in, Maddie. Well, thanks Charlotte, who made this all happen. Charlotte, we appreciate you. And, yeah, Ken Carter is a riot. His new book is called Buzz Inside the Minds of Thrill Seekers, Daredevels, and Adrenaline Junkies. If you have a science question, you, listening to this podcast right now, please send it our way.

We might answer it in a future episode. Just shoot us an email over at shortwave at npr.org. And we'll be back next week with more shortwave from NPR. This week's episodes of shortwave were produced by Brett Bachman, Rebecca Ramirez, and Britt Hansen, and edited by Viet Leigh.