Thrill Seeking

As a software engineer, I sometimes find myself envying my computer. It is so perfectly capable of making decisions based solely on data. It doesn't ever have a gut feeling or a prejudice that it uses to make decisions. Just the facts. Even when a piece of software uses heuristic algorithms to model instincts, it's still all numbers at the deepest level.

Now I don't wish to be a computer. I understand that prejudice and feelings are merely incarnations of my intuitive thinking, and that I couldn't possibly get anything done without them. For most people though our intuitive brains have too much control. Humans are notoriously bad at calculating real risk/reward tradeoffs, and we let our irrational fears waste our time and resources.

Take for instance the fear people have of flying. If people could actually do the full analysis they'd find they're about as likely to die in a plane crash as they are to die in their car driving to the airport. They're also far more likely to die from a heart attack or stroke brought on by the conditions within the plane, especially coupled with the increased stress from the fear of the plane crashing.

I know the rationality behind it, but even still as soon as I get on a plane I'm hyper-aware of every weird sound coming from the engines, and every bump of turbulence invokes a small tinge of fear deep in my gut. I don't outwardly react to these feelings, but they're still there, and still very powerful.

So I wondered: "How can I train the intuitive sections of my brain to not be afraid of such silly things?" You can't reason with your gut, or read it a book. So how can you train it?

Well that got me thinking about how our intuition learns things in the first place. How do we "know" to be afraid of airplanes? How does reality tell our gut something is dangerous? I can see two important channels: We learn that people we respect fear the thing, or we witness something bad and associate it with the thing.

At a young age we haven't had many experiences, so we rely heavily on the first channel. Children have a sixth sense that lets them sense when their mother is worried about something. If mom says "don't play with that toy", the child decides whether to play with it or not. But there's something different when mom says "don't touch the hot stove." Even a toddler knows the difference. To this day I can't touch a stove without my gut warning me about it, even though I've never personally experienced the pain. So our intuition can be easily trained by using fear... Hmm...

The second channel for training the gut is a little more complex. When something bad happens to us we try to reason why it happened so we can avoid it in the future. But somehow that reasoning makes its way to our gut. And often the gut picks up on things that aren't logically related. In some ways this is similar to us telling ourselves to be afraid of something, but we also unwittingly associate other details of the event with the bad feeling. Still, it seems that fear trains the gut.


So if fear trains our gut to be fearful of things, how can it be untrained?

Fortunately our intuition isn't only about bad things. We can "sense" that something good is coming. When you're about to unwrap a present you feel excitement and pleasure. Your gut has learned that gifts are good so it prepares you to enjoy it. This is true even though the box might be full of rocks, or worse something dangerous like poisonous snakes.

How many times would you have to unwrap a box full of snakes before opening presents invoked feelings of fear instead of joy?

I think that for most people one gifts of cobras would be enough to ruin presents. No matter how many times opening presents turned out good, on bad time can ruin the whole experience. Fear is a far more powerful teaching mechanism than joy. Still, it would seem that a very large amount of positive reinforcement might be able to override a bad experience.

So we know that we can train our intuition through experience, and that fear trains us a lot quicker than fun. How can we use this to train our gut to not be afraid of things.

Thrill Seeking

The first time we ride on a roller coaster, our intuition tells us to get off. We're genuinely afraid in our core. Our conscious mind forces us to stay put however, and in the end we find the experience fun. If we ride that coaster again, are we still afraid of it? There's always a little fear, but our fear of coasters shrinks with every coaster we ride. Going rock climbing, skiing, or any other "thrilling" activity has a similar effect.

The feelings of fear make our intuition learn things are safe a lot faster than reason can. How many books about roller coaster safety would you have to read to reduce your gut fear as much as just riding one?

When we train ourselves to reduce our fear for one thing, like roller coasters, we also enjoy a secondary effect of reducing our overall fear for things. Taken to the extreme we become "thrill seekers" who seemingly aren't afraid of anything.

Normally calling someone a "thrill seeker" isn't the same as calling them a genius, but in reality these people have developed a way to shift their rational/intuitive balance towards being more logical. Perhaps the best known daredevils simply didn't have much logical brain to shift to leaving them with very little brain at all. But someone with a strong logical side could use thrill seeking as a way decrease their over-active gut.

I'm glad that I've skied double-black diamond runs. I'm glad I've gotten stuck rock climbing up a cliff after the sun sets. Driving my car really fast is fun too. Experiences like these have helped teach my intuition that "things will be ok". It helps me use my rational brain when making decisions.