What makes extreme athletes risk it all

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Newsletter sign-up. This topic is very much on the frontier of scientific debate and various schools of thought have come up with different ways of explaining risk and why people act particular ways. Climbers are a great example of high sensation seekers and score higher on risk-preference tests. Zuckerberg argues that the cortical system of an HSS person can handle higher levels of stimulation without overloading their brain and switching to the fight-or-flight response.

Some scientists believe that society makes us more risky. In the age of seatbelts, guardrails, laws, rules, regulations, etc. In other words, people who get easily bored with their lives take on more risk to liven it up.

A good ski example would be the more safety precautions yellow jackets, mandatory safety bars, roped off ski runs we take, the more people push the envelope, ski recklessly, and try to get thrills. Some scientists believe genetics has something to do with people assuming excessive risk. They believe that certain humans have a high-risk gene that has aided our species and has helped us advance to the top of the food chain.

Primitive human in a hunter-gatherer society could have benefited from people taking the risk of eating poisonous fruit or vegetables in return for valuable societal knowledge. This is also present in the modern era, for example, think of the moon landing, civil rights demonstrations, or ski example Shane McConkey.

Certain people with the gene assumed excessive risk for the advancement of society or area of interest. Lastly, scientists believe there is a learned cultural element to people taking risk. I remember being in a lift line and hearing some other guys talk about skiing and I seriously thought they were speaking another language.

Learning the culture of the sport, lingo, code of ethics or conduct lift line etiquette! The athletes do the same things we all do, only much, much better. But that's not how I felt watching Canada's freestyle skiers twist and flip through the air in Sochi last month.

In this and other newer extreme events, I wasn't just amazed at the prowess of the medalists; I was amazed that anyone dares to take part in these sports in the first place. According to research from the University of British Columbia, that may relate to how my brain is wired.

Studies of skiers, snowboarders and other extreme athletes are shedding new light on why different people are attracted to different types of activities — and learning more might help us establish exercise patterns we can stick with, as well as channelling behaviour like risk- and sensation-seeking toward a positive outlet.

While many sports carry risks, there's a subset of sports in which risk isn't just a by-product — it's one of the main attractions. This seemingly irrational attraction is what Dr. Jim Rupert, though she'd initially intended to study a completely different topic. Intrigued by the question, Thomson recruited a sample of skiers and snowboarders in Whistler, Vancouver, Lake Louise, and Banff, and performed a series of psychological and genetic tests, as well as assessing their sports-specific risk-taking behaviour.

She zeroed in on a gene called DRD4, which helps determine the density of dopamine receptors in the brain. Dopamine is a brain chemical often linked to reward-seeking, for example to the "high" experienced by a skydiver during a jump. A single variation in the coding of this gene has been associated in previous studies with sensation-seeking behaviour including drug use, and sure enough, the skiers in Thomson's study with this particular variant of the gene also displayed more risk-taking behaviour on the slopes.

For a follow-up study, Thomson, who is now at Quest University in Squamish, went to the adventure-sports hub of Chamonix, in France, to compare athletes in high-risk sports such as skydiving, parkour, paragliding and BASE jumping to more sedate activities such as running and yoga.

While the results have yet to be published, differences in sensation-seeking were again apparent.