Buzz Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers

get about 60 seconds of life-choice-questioning free fall before you deploy your parachute and start to slow down. BASE jumping ...

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick- SENT-me-high) refers to the feeling Nick described as a flow state: bein ...

As a low sensation-seeker, I would have been so over- whelmed – flooded by the sensations and deafened by my own screams of terr ...

during the stressful period, while revving up the parts of your body that are crucial to survival (like your muscles). Under the ...

stimulation doesn’t even get our attention. When arousal levels are just right, we are at our best. However, that perfect level ...

landing point to join his other jumper friends. “I’ve always roman- ticized flying,” he told me later. “From the time I was 5 ye ...

each offering up a part of the story of you. Put the letters together in the genome and you have the story – provided you have p ...

of a specific trait might be due to genes versus the environment. Heritability estimates range from 0 (meaning that genes have n ...

which would result in the perfect version of every living thing existing in harmony with the environment. Not exactly. The gen- ...

further. Long ago, some curious high experience-seeker must have opened it and then enjoyed the reward of finding out that it wa ...

the neural motivation system, and it regulates how sensitive we are to rewards and punishments. What’s more, it helps us move to ...

the odors, of adolescent boys. It fuels healthy libido, muscle mass, and energy levels. Getting the right amount in your system ...

There appears to be an inverse relationship between MAO and sensation-seeking.^20 When MAO levels are high, the neuro- transmitt ...

doesn’t. Researchers are just now teasing apart how the arousal, approach, and inhibition systems might work differently in high ...

stress response. Some researchers say that people with high sensa- tion-seeking personalities tend to have a different sensitivi ...

Biological Differences Let’s take a look at how these biological differences manifest them- selves in each of the four subtypes ...

Boredom Susceptibility People who are susceptible to boredom have a difficult time tolerat- ing repetition and non-reward. For t ...

during childhood, is related to high sensation-seeking in adulthood. Parents, for example, can have an impact on the development ...

seeking, especially the disinhibition component, and especially in males. Clearly biological factors aren’t the only things that ...

Methylation is powerful. For example, when a honey bee is fed royal jelly, methylation causes the bee to grow larger, live longe ...