But if realistic video games aren’t scary, how are totally abstract things like stories in books so terrifying? It may be to do with control. When playing a video game, you are in total control of the environment; you can pause the game, it responds to your actions in it, and so on. This isn’t the case for scary books or films, where the individual is a passive observer and, while caught up in the narrative, has no influence over what happens in it. (You can close a book, but that doesn’t alter the story.) Sometimes the impressions and experiences of the film or book can stay with us long after, unsettling us for quite some time. The vivid memories will explain this, as they keep being revisited and activated as they “bed in.” Overall, the more the brain retains control over events, the less scary they are. This is why some things that are “best left to the imagination” are actually more terrifying than the goriest effects.
The 1970s, long before CGI and advanced prosthetics, are widely regarded by connoisseurs of the genre as a golden age of horror films. All the scares had to come from suggestion, timing, atmosphere and other clever tricks. As a result, the brain’s tendency to look for and predict threats and dangers did most of the work, causing people literally to jump at shadows. The arrival of cutting-edge effects via big Hollywood studios meant the actual horror was far more blatant and direct, with buckets of blood and CGI replacing psychological suspense. There’s room for both approaches, and others, but when the horror is conveyed so directly, the brain isn’t as engaged, leaving it free to think and analyze, and remain aware that this is all a fictional scenario that could be avoided at any time, and as such the scares don’t have the same impact. Video game makers have learned this, with survival horror games being a genre that requires the character to avoid an overwhelming danger in a tense, uncertain environment, rather than blow it into countless wobbly pieces with an oversized laser cannon.28
It’s arguably the same with extreme sports and other thrill-seeking activities. The human brain is perfectly able to distinguish actual risk from artificial risk, and there usually needs to be the very real possibility of unpleasant consequences for the true thrill to be experienced. A complex set-up using screens, harnesses and giant fans could feasibly replicate the sensation of bungee jumping, but it would be unlikely to be authentic enough to convince your brain that you are falling from a great height, and thus the danger of actually hitting the ground is removed, and the experience is not the same. The perception of traveling up and down quickly through space is hard to replicate without actually doing it, hence the existence of rollercoasters.
The less control you have over the scary sensation, the more thrilling it is. But there’s a cut-off point, as there still has to be some influence over events in order to make it “fun” scary, rather than simply terrifying. Falling out of a plane with a parachute is considered exciting and fun. Falling out of a plane without a parachute on your back is not. For the brain to enjoy a thrilling activity, it seems there has to be some actual risk involved, but also some ability to influence the outcome, so the risks can be avoided. Most people who survive a car crash feel relieved to be alive, but there’s rarely any desire to go through it again.
Also, the brain has that weird habit, hinted at earlier, called counterfactual thinking; the tendency to dwell on the possible negative outcomes of events that never happened.29 This is going to be even more noticeable when the event itself was a scary one, as there’s the sense of actual danger. If you narrowly avoid being hit by a car while crossing the road, you might think about how you could have been hit for days afterwards. But you weren’t; nothing has physically changed for you at all. But the brain really does like to focus on a potential threat, be it in the past, present or future.
People who enjoy this sort of thing are often labeled adrenalin junkies. “Sensation seeking” is a recognized personality trait,30 where individuals constantly strive for new, varied, complex and intense experiences, invariably at some physical/financial/legal risk (losing money and getting arrested are also dangers many people strongly wish to avoid). The previous paragraphs argued that a certain amount of control over events is required to enjoy thrills properly, but it’s possible that sensation-seeking tendencies cloud the ability to assess or recognize risk and control accurately. A psychological study from the late 1980s looked at skiers, comparing injured skiers to uninjured skiers.31 They found injured skiers were far more likely to be sensation seekers than the uninjured ones, suggesting their drive for thrilling sensations caused them to make decisions or perform actions that pushed events beyond their ability to control, resulting in injury. It’s a cruel irony that a desire for seeking risk may also cloud your ability to recognize it.
Why some people end up with such extreme tendencies is uncertain. It could just happen gradually, a brief flirtation with a risky experience providing some enjoyable thrills, leading to seeking out more and more with ever increasing intensity. This is the traditional “slippery slope” argument. Quite an appropriate term for skiers, really.
Some studies have looked into more biological or neurological factors. There’s some evidence that certain genes, such as DRD4, which encodes a certain class of dopamine receptor, can be mutated in sensation-seeking individuals, suggesting that activity in the mesolimbic reward pathway is altered, resulting in changes in the way sensations are rewarded.32 If the mesolimbic pathway is more active, intense experiences may be even more powerful. But if it is less powerful, it may require more intense stimulation to achieve true enjoyment as a result; the sort of thing most of us take for granted would require extra life-risking effort. Either way, people could end up seeking more stimulation. Trying to figure out the role of a specific gene in the brain is always a long and complex process, so we don’t know this for certain yet.
Another study from 2007 by Sarah B. Martin and her colleagues scanned the brains of dozens of subjects with varying scores on the experience-seeking personality scale and their paper claims that sensation-seeking behavior is correlated with an enlarged right anterior hippocampus.33 The evidence suggests that this is the part of the brain and memory system that is responsible for processing and recognizing novelty. Basically, the memory system runs information via this area and says, “Have a look at this. Have we seen this before?” and the right anterior hippocampus says yes or no. We don’t know exactly what the increased size of this area means. It could be that the individual has experienced so many novel things that the novelty-recognizing area has expanded to cope, or maybe it’s that the novelty-detecting region is overly developed so requires something a lot more unusual to be truly recognized as novel. If this were the case, novel stimulations and experiences are potentially more important and salient to these individuals.