That Neuroscience Guy - Neuroscience Bites: Thrill-Seeking

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Do you consider yourself an adrenaline junkie, or do you prefer to avoid dangerous hobbies? In today's Neuroscience Bite, we discuss the neuroscience of Thrill-seeking.  

Hi, my name is Olof Krogolsen and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to another neuroscience bite. I'm coming to you from Whistler, Canada, one of the best places to ski and snowboard in the world. And to be fair, there's lots of other cool things you can do up here. But I was here to snowboard and up on the mountain today, I was going down a run and I stopped to take a look at what was going on in the half pipe. And I just saw some crazy stuff. You know, one kid got upside down, pulled off a 360 and landed it. And I just thought to myself, you know, I'm a pretty decent snowboarder. I've been doing it most of my life. But I would never even dream of doing what that kid did. So it made me think about thrill-seeking, like people that chase the rush.

Like people jump off of buildings, base jumping. People swim with sharks, bungee jumping, skydiving, you name it. There's tons of activities that people have created so that we can seek our thrills. So what's going on in the brain? Well, it reminds me of a study I read recently, which was really looking into this exact issue. And what the research team did was find a group of people that were thrill seekers and another group of people that were basically the complete opposite. And they of course verified this through psychological testing. But then what they

did was put them in the fMRI scanner and they showed them pictures of thrill-seeking activities. So snowboarding upside down, base jumping, bungee jumping, swimming with sharks, you name it. And what they found was super cool. The people that were thrill-seekers had more activity in their insular cortex and less activity in their preular cortex and less activity in their prefrontal cortex. And the people that weren't thrill seekers had more activity in their

prefrontal cortex and less activity in the insular cortex. Now, the prefrontal cortex story is pretty cool. And it's pretty easy if you've listened to some of our other episodes. Basically, you could imagine in the non-thrill seekers that they're listening to their rational decision-making system, which would live in the prefrontal cortex. And it's, you know, you can imagine it's giving you all the reasons you shouldn't try this. It's dangerous. You might hurt yourself. And of course, in the thrill seekers, you want to turn that off, right? You definitely don't want to listen to that. But what about the insular cortex? Well, the insular cortex is kind of cool,

because it's tied to controlling your emotions and emotional regulation, amongst other things, of course. So the increased activity in the insular cortex for the thrill seekers would be associated with that rush. It's also controlling the amygdala, which of course would be responding to the situation. You know, it's responsible for releases of dopamine and endorphins and adrenaline. And in the non-thrill seekers, this region is not doing that stuff. It's basically turning itself off. So if you're a thrill seeker and you're out there, blame your insular cortex. Because it's really the thing driving the show.

And I guess the prefrontal cortex has to take a little bit of responsibility as well. Anyway, my name is Olof Kregolsen, and I'm That Neuroscience Guy. Thanks so much for listening to another neuroscience bite. And don't forget, you can follow me on Twitter, at That Neuroscience Guy. I drop cool new research from the Kregolsen Lab and other stuff I've read. Our new website, thatneuroscienceguy.com, that'll take you to Patreon, where you can support us if you want to, possibly buy some merch. We started releasing some t-shirts with more to come. And of course, there's links to my blog and some other cool stuff. Thanks for listening to our podcast. I'll be back to you on Sunday with another full episode of That Neuroscience Guy. Thank you you and have a great day.