Jeff Wise – Page 47

When Summer Fun Turns Deadly Serious

I was in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado yesterday, whitewater rafting on the Arkansas River with a highly experienced outfitter called KODI Rafting. We were to start the day with a seven-mile run down the Numbers rapids, a continuous stretch of Class III and Class IV whitewater that takes about two hours to complete. It’s a challenging stretch of water that demands an aggressive approach. People can and do get hurt.

As we rode to the put-in on a former schoolbus, the head guide gave us a run-down of what to do if we fell out of the boat: one, immediately swim for the boat and try to get back in. Two, if you get separated from the boat, lift your feet up and point them downstream so that you can ward off rocks. And so on. It was all very solid and reasonable advice. But having spent the last few years studying the human fear response, I found myself wondering: if any of us novice rafters winds up in the drink, are we going to remember any of this advice amid our rising panic? Continue reading When Summer Fun Turns Deadly Serious

I Want My Inflatable Airplane

From the good folks at AvWeb, a story about the Swiss ultralight design that’s something like a cross between a hang glider and a powered parachute — and also bears a family resemblance to my ultimate fantasy aircraft, the Goodyear Inflatoplane. This was an otherwise conventional airplane which happened to have wings and a fusalage made out of inflatable rubber. The idea was that if one of your pilots bailed out behind enemy lines you could drop this to him and he could blow it up and fly it to safety. (Then, presumably, use it as a pool toy once he’d gotten back home.) Like many of the coolest ideas in aviation, it was a long way from practical. Here’s what it looked like:

If nothing else, one imagines that the crashes would be less than catastrophic.

Can a Common Health Supplement Help Conquer Fear?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could master your fears with a single dose of medicine? It’s an age-old dream — people have been finding courage in a bottle for thousands of years — but recently military psychologists have begun to think they might be hot on the trail of a formulation that could actually work without getting users high as a kite.

Most of us have enjoyed a little “Dutch courage” now and again. It’s great for loosening up social anxieties at cocktail parties and the like; one of alcohol’s many neurological effects is that it dampens the stress circuitry within the brain. Of course, other effects include loss of coordination and impaired decision-making, meaning that in high-pressure situations alcohol tends to do more harm than good. More recently, psychiatrists have prescribed benzodiazepines like Xanax for anxiety, but these too can cause serious cognitive impairment, and are highly addictive to boot.

Beta blockers like Propanolol aren’t nearly as mind-altering, but they have drawbacks of their own: by suppressing the sympathetic nervous system, they make it hard for users to engage in strenuous physical activity. In the military, you tend to do a lot of that.

So what’s the magic bullet? Some high-tech, top-secret formulation? Nope. Turns out to be a substance you can buy over the counter at most health food stores. Continue reading Can a Common Health Supplement Help Conquer Fear?

Montana Ranching: The Uncensored Story

The New York Times is running a story tomorrow that I wrote about hardcore vacation ranches out West, where guests take part in running real working cattle ranch. (It’s already available online, though.) Unfortunately, they had to cut out some of the more vivid scenes from the piece. “We’re a family newspaper,” my editor said. I didn’t think that what they took out was all that gruesome, but in my estimation it went a long way toward establishing just how hardcore these experiences are. This isn’t a Disney Channel version of cattle ranching; animals get castrated, have their ovaries pulled out, get tags punched into their ears, and all the rest.

At any rate, in the interest of full and complete reporting, I’m putting the full version online below, so those of a more hardy disposition can learn what these ranches are all about. Continue reading Montana Ranching: The Uncensored Story

Career Limbo: Why Intelligent People Get Stuck

My friend Tucker is one of the funniest, most incisive people I’ve ever met. Ever since he graduated from a prestigious university 15 years ago, he’s thrived in the intellectual circles of New York City, where his easygoing charm has won him friends in every branch of the arts.

In almost every way his life was a success. But career-wise, he was in the deep freeze. Having quickly landed a low-level job with a prestigious publishing company soon after graduation, he languished in the same job. What he really wanted was to be a professional illustrator, but he’d had to get by doing clerical work as his creative-minded peers rose up through the ranks at magazines and advertising agencies.

What went wrong? In a word, fear. Continue reading Career Limbo: Why Intelligent People Get Stuck

Is the TSA Fighting Terror, or Abetting It?

This week the ever-excellent aviation blogger (and commercial pilot) Patrick Smith posed the question: why haven’t Americans rebelled against the petty tyranny of the Transportation Safety Administration?

…one of the things that has always baffled and frustrated me is the lack of any organized protest against TSA by the airlines, the media or the traveling public. People complain, roll their eyes and maybe make a wisecrack or two, but there have been few formal calls for agency accountability. Groups like FlyersRights.org never miss a chance to exploit the latest tarmac stranding, but are mostly silent when it comes to the single biggest indignity of the air travel experience: concourse passenger screening.

I’d like to second Smith’s irritation, and go one further: are America’s transportation policies not fighting terrorism, but actually serving its ends?

There’s no question that the government’s intent is good. But as psychologists of fear know all too well, attempts to control fear are prone to what are known as “paradoxical effects.” Trying to quell anxiety can have the opposite result. Continue reading Is the TSA Fighting Terror, or Abetting It?

Readers Write: "How Fear Stopped Time"

Recently, I wrote about how extreme fear distorts our perception of time, causing it to seemingly move in slow motion. In response, a number of readers wrote in with fascinating stories of their own, many of which offer intriguing insights into the phenomenon.

One comment came from a reader who experienced time dilation not in a life-threatening crisis, but in the adrenaline-charged milieu of the boxing ring:

I box at a local gym, nothing big. But the guys there a really good some go pro. Watching them from outside the ring they just look lightning fast. But in the ring with them time does seem to slow down. I can see punches coming a lot “slower” than when I’m not in there getting punched in the face. I have time to react and counter. Continue reading Readers Write: "How Fear Stopped Time"

I Feel Like I’m Floating on Air

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Last week I got a lesson in piloting a C-Quester submarine in Aruba, a thrilling experience. I was struck by how similar it feels to flying a Zeppelin, which I wrote about for the July issue of Popular Mechanics. In both cases, you’re zooming along in a horizontal plane, while trying to maintain your altitude (or depth) by countering buoyancy effects with vertical thrusters. In both cases, you have to anticipate your correction well before it takes effect — there’s a huge lag time.

And in both cases, you’re bound to have a thrill of a lifetime. If you have a chance to try either one, I’d strongly suggest you take it.

Fat, Drunk, and Broke? Don’t Blame the Caveman

Spare a thought for the most abused demographic in the US today: the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer. These plucky ancestors, who scurried across the earth from two million to 12,000 years ago, have lately taken responsibility and blame for seemingly every aspect of modern life.

Cavemen-bashers would have us believe that because our brains evolved in a world where hunting and gathering were requisite skills, not juggling frequent flier points or angling for a promotion, we’re ill equipped to deal with modern life. We want to be good, but our brains are forever subconsciously pulling us back to our cavemen ways. Marital fidelity? Not in our genes. Peaceful co-existence? Not adaptive for life on the savannah.

Lately, Pleistocene hunter gatherers seem to be getting an especially harsh ragging on behalf of the obesity epidemic. If the last time you stepped on your bathroom scale it broke, the common wisdom seems to be, just blame the atlatl-wielders.

In the May/June issue of Psychology Today, Leyla Muedin argues in “The Way We Were” (p. 51) that “our bodies are best adapted to what our Paleolithic ancestors ate.” Back in the good old days, she writes, “over the course of a year, you might eat 100 different types of fruit and vegetables… but you wouldn’t drink any milk or consume any dairy products.” She quotes S. Boyd Easton, an anthropologist at Emory University,who wrote in a recent editorial in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that “the dietary and lifestyle difference between then and now account for most of our chronic diseases and cancer.”

How is this absurd? Let me count the ways. Continue reading Fat, Drunk, and Broke? Don’t Blame the Caveman

What Makes Sports Fans Happiest: Fear and Despair

Everyone knows that the US Soccer team is all but certain to go down in flames sometime between now and the finals of the FIFA World Cup on July 11. And for American fans, that could be wonderful thing, researchers say.

A recent study by a team at Ohio State University looked at 113 college football fans as they watched a game between their school’s team and that of an arch rival. The subjects were asked to watch a particularly crucial game and then log their emotional state during commercial breaks. They also logged their perception of their teams’ chance of victory. It turned out that fans who thought the game was the most enjoyable were those who were convinced at some point during the game that their team would lose – but then watched as the team turned around and managed to win. From the press release:

The results showed how important negative emotions were to enjoyment of the game. “When people think about entertainment in general, they think it has to be fun and pleasurable. But enjoyment doesn’t always mean positive emotions,” [said study co-author Prabu] David. “Sometimes enjoyment is derived by having the negative emotion, and then juxtaposing that with the positive emotion.”

… “You need the negative emotions of thinking your team might lose to get you in an excited, nervous state,” [study co-author Silvia] Knobloch Westerwick said. “If your team wins, all that negative tension is suddenly converted to positive energy, which will put you in a euphoric state.”

In a sense this study (which seems to me far from rigorous) offers up a pretty unsurprising conclusion: ask any screenwriter about how to craft a gripping plotline, and they’ll tell you that the hero must find herself in the grip of a seemingly inextricable problem at the end of Act Two.

But this study’s results also serve as a reminder of a larger, and very important point: that the pursuit of unalloyed pleasure is a doomed undertaking. Continue reading What Makes Sports Fans Happiest: Fear and Despair