Are Thrills Your Thing?

The statement “truth is stranger than fiction” may be a cliché, but it tells it best. A few years ago a twenty-nine-year-old student from Long Beach, California, pushed his hang glider off a cliff and promptly slammed to earth six hundred feet below. He wasn’t wearing a helmet. After several days spent near death in an intensive care unit, he was discharged from the hospital and soon returned to his favorite sport—hang gliding.

Why do people take chances? Humans, it seems, have an unexplained urge for stimulation. Call it thrill seeking, if you will—it exists in degrees in every person, from high-wire artists to children on skateboards. The appetite for thrills peaks in our teens, then gradually decreases as we grow older, but some of us never quite lose the desire to experience new and exciting kicks.

Dr. Marvin Zuckerman calls this phenomenon “sensation seeking.” He believes it is a universal trait that probably has a biological basis. Through extensive research, Zuckerman has devised a number of questionnaires that identify those who actively seek to bombard their senses as a means of sparking up their lives. For these people, paths to the sensational could include such simple activities as ordering an exotic dish, speeding, or reading adventure stories instead of romance novels.

To test your sensation-seeking tendencies, try the following quiz. It is based on one of Dr. Zuckerman’s tests.