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WHAT MAKES US SEEK OUT FEAR?

Danger is booming—as a pastime. Are we crazy? Or just reacting against mollycoddling? Deirdre Fernand talks to risk-takers and academics ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Spring 2009

“AAEEEIOUUUU…!” There are not enough vowels in the alphabet to capture the strangulated cry uttered by Tom Fox as he hurls himself off the Cornish rocks into the sea. Arms crossed against his chest, bottom tucked in and knees slightly bent, he makes a perfect entry into the water 25 feet below. Coming up for air, he dives again into a foamy whirlpool, known by locals as the washing machine. From a distance he does indeed look as if he has been trapped in the spin cycle.

On a wet, windy day, Fox and his friends are coasteering, exploring the shoreline in a sport that calls for no boats, no ropes, just manpower. Wearing wetsuits, gloves and helmets, they swim along the base of the cliffs, clamber up rockfaces and dive into caves. It’s fast, furious and, in the wrong weather, highly risky.

If Fox’s yelp taxes our alphabet, then the boom in extreme sports is taxing our vocabulary. First there was bungee jumping, then free-running (vaulting from building to building) and BASE-jumping (parachuting off a fixed point: it stands for building, antennae, span or earth). Now these have been joined by zorbing (rolling down slopes strapped inside a sphere) and snowkiting—the combination of kitesurfing and snowboarding.  

Each activity has its own fraternity. And among them is a hierarchy: most coasteerers, like experienced mountaineers, regard zorbers or bungee jumpers as dilettantes. “We take risks,” says Fox, a 21-year-old former chef, who coasteers most weekends from Lusty Glaze beach, north Cornwall. “But we take them from a place of safety. We’re fit, we train and it’s not all about getting a quick fix of adrenaline. When we master our fears, the reward is huge. Everything is heightened and I feel good for days.”

Fox and friends are men for whom kicking a football or converting a try is not enough. And they are not alone. Parachutists and hang-gliders float through the skies, rock-climbers cling to sheer faces and off-piste skiers are dropped from helicopters. In the rainforests, the intrepid explore canopies on zip wires. In the oceans, we swim with sharks or free-dive without oxygen. And in the Alps, the hardy and the foolhardy bomb down the Cresta Run. Climb every mountain, ford every stream has become a reality: the Me Generation has given way to the Wheee Generation.

There are young people whose sole ambition on leaving school seems to be to visit Queenstown, New Zealand, the self-styled adventure capital of the world. The land that gave us the bungee jump 20 years ago has a new attraction, the Nevis Arc, said to be the world’s highest flying trapeze. This giant swing sends its customers across a 120-metre gorge at a height of 153 metres. In Nepal, you will soon be able to parachute out of a plane at the height of Everest and land in the highest drop zone on earth. At £15,990 for 55 seconds, it will be no cheap thrill.  

A Mintel survey of the adventure travel industry last April found that activity holidays had increased by 17.2% over four years, far more than the overall market (2.8%). Adrenaline holidays are moving from a niche market to a mainstream one: the tour operator Thomson has 20 dedicated brands serving 400,000 customers a year. Danger is an international industry.

Age is no barrier. Although Mintel found that participants were most likely to be 20 to 44, plenty of over-40s have a taste for danger. Dr Peter McCue, a clinical psychologist from Glasgow, took up skydiving when he was 40: “If I wasn’t going to do it then, when was it going to be?” McCue, whose 17-year-old son has also taken up skydiving, doesn’t worry unduly about it. “How each of us views risk is a very personal matter,” he says. “To be honest I am more anxious about my son being glassed in the centre of Glasgow as the pubs are closing.” The figures arguably back him up. About 150 Britons die every year taking part in adventure sports, whereas accidents on the roads and in the home kill 6,000.

So what is making us seek out fear? Is it the whoosh of adrenaline flooding our brains? For men like Martin Ollerenshaw it’s more a reaction to our sedentary society where there are no dragons to slay or mastodons to hunt. A 35-year-old teacher from Looe, Ollerenshaw surfs and coasteers along the Cornish coast. “It’s an escape from the mundane and the routine,” he says. “If I don’t do it for a while, I feel prickly. I need to take those risks to feel fully human, fully alive. It’s about joy and intensity.”

Previous generations have not needed to look far for danger. We have only to pick up the war poems of Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon to see that they might have welcomed the mundane and routine. When Laurie Lee left Gloucestershire in search of adventure, he found himself fighting in the Spanish civil war. His memoir “As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning” showed that he had left a boy and come back a man.

Perhaps that’s the key. Social anthropologists tend to see extreme sports as rites of passage. As Mark van Vuyt, professor of psychology at the University of Kent, says: “In evolutionary terms it pays for young males to compete in excessive risk-taking. If they thought something was too risky and didn’t do it, they wouldn’t distinguish themselves and wouldn’t get female attention.” In some societies, young men are sent off to kill a lion or spend weeks alone in the desert as an initiation rite. In the 1950s, David Attenborough brought back footage of the land divers of Vanuatu, who jump from tall wooden platforms with vines tied to their ankles to prove their manhood: bungee jumpers, essentially.

So much for young men. But where are the women? Playing it relatively safe, psychometric testing has shown. “Though individuals vary, few women seek out risks,” Mark van Vuyt says. “Their role has been to protect children and they err on the side of caution.” Perhaps risk-taking really is all about testosterone and atavism. As the science writer William Allman once wrote: “Our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind.”

Thanks to developments in neurology, those Stone Age minds are becoming transparent. Dr Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, reader in cognitive neuroscience at University College London, says: “Contrary to previous belief, the brain does not stop changing after the pre-school years. It undergoes dramatic development during adolescence, and this could explain some stereotypical teenage behaviour such as risk-taking.” Using functional MRI, which produces pictures of the living brain at work, Blakemore and her researchers found that thinking about intentions and actions activated the network known as the “social brain” in both adolescents and adults, but in adolescents, the medial prefrontal cortex, an important area of the social brain, was found to be much more active. “These findings are still being studied, but what we do know is that the adolescent social brain is a work in progress.” Expecting young people to behave just like adults, therefore, is unrealistic. They may be wired to view the world differently.

Phew. Those of us with teenagers can start to feel a little better. As parents, it seems that we spend our days removing risk from our children’s lives, only for them to spend their entire time putting it back again. That is the view, passionately held, of Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent. The author of “Paranoid Parenting”, Furedi feels that today’s children are battery hens, not free-range as their parents were. What he calls the “steady erosion of children’s freedom” has seen conkers, handstands and skipping ropes banned from many playgrounds. In 2005 the Children’s Play Council found that in term time 20% of children played outside for an hour or less a week. “The idea of sending the kids off to the park and expecting them back at mealtimes”, Furedi adds, “is now regarded as a historical curiosity.”

He thinks children could benefit from benign neglect. “As long as we do not confuse risk with stupidity, we should give them as much liberty as we can,” he says. “We are always telling children they can’t do this and that. We should pause and ask ourselves: ‘Am I acting in the child’s best interests? Or am I thinking only of my own anxiety?’ People are always saying that children are growing up fast these days. Nothing could be further from the truth. They are learning helplessness.”

There are signs now that the tide is turning. A new British watchdog, the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council, aims to “bring back common sense” into childhood. Three years ago “The Dangerous Book for Boys” became a bestseller. With chapters on catapults and archery, it was hardly reckless stuff but, in this age of conker bans, it had a subversive allure—to fathers as well as sons. Then there are the burgeoning back-to-nature courses, where Outward Bound meets the SAS. The survival expert Steve Price takes people into the wild to skin rabbits and eat nettle soup. His mantra is “Improvise. Adapt. Overcome.”  

A century ago, the opposite view prevailed. Psychologists, inspired by Freud’s work on the unconscious, regarded risk-taking as evidence of a diseased mind. In “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” (1920), Freud referred to a death wish, known as “Thanatos” after the Greek personification of death, to describe what he saw as suicidal tendencies. As Ken Way, a sports psychologist working with leading athletes including the yachtsman Alex Thomson, explains: “Mountaineers or those who put their lives in danger were seen as weird and somehow damaged.”

Modern psychologists have sought to overturn Freud’s Thanatos theory, citing lack of evidence. They point out that many factors other than safety come into play when we act—love, heroism, loyalty, altruism. “Now the consensus is completely different,” Way says. “Personality studies and psychological profiling support the idea that those who regularly take on calculated risks tend to be the least anxious, the least neurotic. They are resilient people who manage their fear and still perform.” The sportswriter Simon Barnes agrees. “Some people think it’s got something to do with a death wish,” he has written of perilous pastimes such as three-day eventing. “It’s not. Life wish, more like.”

So the risk-takers are not an aberration. The aberration is those of us who are slumped on the sofa of life. “If we remove risk from our lives,” Way says, “we never find out our strengths and weaknesses. We stagnate.” Peter McCue, still skydiving at 60, knows this, as does Martin Ollerenshaw, who “self-medicates” most weekends with his surfboard; and so does Tom Fox. Last seen in the washing machine, Fox is now back on land, looking ready for the drier. After three hours’ peril on the sea he should be exhausted, but he isn’t. “When I’m in the water”, he says, “I’m concentrating on being as safe as I can be, totally absorbed in the moment. There’s nothing like it.”  
 

Picture Credit: Strocchi, Murdoch666 (both via Flickr)

(Deirdre Fernand recently left the Sunday Times after 20 years there as writer and editor.)