Psychology Today Blogs - The Playing Field

Women and Warfare: It's Not Just For Amazons Anymore

Steven Kotler — Wed, 14 May 2008 07:03:47 -0700

The hunter-gather mythos tells a pretty straightforward story: Men did the hunting, women did everything else.

Everything else included gathering berries and plucking fruit and digging tubers. Women tended the fire and cooked the food and reared the children. And in these days before birth-control or reproductive knowledge, those kids came in an endless stream.

Since the notion of peace with one’s neighbors really didn’t come into vogue until after the industrial revolution, warfare was a constant threat and one that was often worse for the women. Why? Because that’s what people fought over before there was such thing as property. Women were the spoils of war. The reason tribes attacked other tribes was to steal their ladies. There was good reason for this: at a time when the only people who had your back were kin, stealing women who could then bear you more children made good evolutionary sense.

But this entire story hangs on one simple notion: that women, being smaller and slighter than men, couldn’t properly defend themselves.

Even tools, those great sexual equalizers, didn’t help the situation. Our ancestry had three main weapons of war: the spear, the club, and the bow and arrow—and all are tools that rely on strength to wield.

But not so fast. There’s a new idea in the works and this idea reshapes much of what we think of when we think of prehistoric warfare.

The new idea isn’t really that new. It’s a 70,000 year old machine known as the “atlatl.” The word itself is borrowed from the Aztecs and describes a combination sling-shot and a spear. The atlatl is not a spear, but a device used to throw a spear: essentially a long stick (usually about a meter in length) with a curved backside. The spear is balanced atop the atlatl, with its back end tucked neatly into the curved end of the device. When the spear-thrower hurls their weapon, the atlatl acts as an extension of the arm, amplifying spear propulsion to speeds of almost 150 m.p.h.

So what the hell does any of this have to do with early feminism? Well, as Grinnell College anthropologist John Whittaker figured out, it turns out, throwing a spear with an atlatl doesn’t actually require that much strength. Instead, it requires a ton of balance and dexterity. And those are two things that women have in spades.

The balance part comes from having wider hips and, thus, a lower center of gravity than men. The dexterity part comes from having to do things like avoid thorns to pluck berries and such. Both are just part of the feminine skill set.

Plus, in the days before armor (or before anything but leather armor), 150 mph is more than enough velocity to throw a spear almost clear through a human torso or, for that matter, a large mammal.

The point is this, by wielding an atlatl, women could have fought and hunted right alongside the men. Thus the whole notion of the defenseless stay-at-home mom goes right out the window.

So why, you might wonder, am I writing about this in a column about the science of sport? Well, the same story that says that men were hunter and women gatherers also says that our earliest sports were extensions of this same division of labor.

The story goes that women didn’t play sports back on the veldt because women didn’t need to practice for the battleground. But the atlatl changes that entire equation, meaning there might have been female games going on eons before anyone ever conceived of Title 9.

Is this a "just so" story or an accurate picture of reality remains to be seen, but the notion does raise plenty of interesting questions about the early history of women athletes.

18 Holes of Ecological Disaster

Steven Kotler — Sun, 11 May 2008 08:20:24 -0700

It started out with a bit of excitement. The latest issue of “Sport’s Illustrated” arrived, in it a story by novelist Carl Hiaasen. The story is about golf or sort of about golf. It was excerpted from Hiaasen’s forthcoming book: The Downhill Lie and was entitled: “A Dangerous Breed of Beast.” But it was the doosy of a subtitle that really caught my attention: “When the author took up golf again after a long hiatus, he figured all he could hurt was his pride. What his game really threatened was the wildlife of his beloved South Florida.”

I was excited by the idea that as venerable a publication as SI would let a name brand writer like Hiaasen tackle a topic as sticky as the environmental impact of golf. And then I started reading.

The story begins with a section entitled: Toad Golf. In it, the author describes visiting a friend’s house which was being overrun by Bofu marinus, an invasive pest that is threatening domestic wildlife in several states. His friend had a simple solution: relocate the toads to a neighbor’s yard by smacking them with a nine iron.

Now, if I walked into a friend’s house and found him hitting toads with golf clubs, the first thing I would do is start hitting my friend with a golf club. Hard.

But not Hiaasen. This asshole picked up a pitching wedge and joined in.

And that’s not even the worst offense. In fact, that’s a minor blip in a major travesty. The travesty is thus: there’s nary a mention of the ecological disaster that we call golf.

Don’t kid yourself, golf is a true nightmare. And America is the worst offender.
The US is now home to 18,000 golf courses, more than half of the world’s 35,000. These courses cover 1.7 million acres and soak up 4 billion gallons of water daily.

In a tropical country such as Thailand, the average golf course uses as much water as 60,000 rural villagers. Here, in the US, the news has lately been buzzing over the idea that a dredging channel cut in 1962, is accidentally draining 2.5 billion gallons a day out of Lake Michigan. This draining is considered a devastating ecological crisis worthy of immediate action. And that number is slightly more than half that golf is taking from us each day.

Even worse, the water that’s evaporating off golf courses and re-entering the atmosphere is loaded down with all sorts of nasty stuff. Golf Course News recently reported the results of a study done in New York that found the typical golf course uses 2.7 times more pesticides per acre than farmland.

And, according to the Rachel Carson Council, 29 of the 49 most common pesticides used by groundskeepers are found on the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory. These include such winners as the herbicide “atrazine” which is a carcinogen, mutagen, immunotoxin and causes adrenal damage to boot and the insecticide “bendiocarb,” which causes cataracts, lung and brain damage, and is a suspected mutagen.

This might help explain why a 1994 University of Iowa College of Medicine study found that an unusually high number of golf course superintendents had died from cancer.

While golfers like to claim that they’re creating green spaces in areas that might be otherwise paved over, what they fail to mention is there’s little difference. Most animals don’t like open spaces. Anything that is small enough to be eaten by raptors is smart enough to hug the treeline. Creating pockets or forest surrounded by fairways is the same as isolating the resident animals on islands. Meaning there’s not enough genetic diversity on these islands to insure a healthy breeding population so inbreeding is the only option. Wait a few generations and the results of incest are simple: no more animals.

The point, as pointed out by Chee Yoke Ling and Mohammad Ferhan Ferrari of the Malaysia-based Asia-Pacific People's Environment Network (APPEN), is simple: "Golf development is one of the most unsustainable and damaging activities to people and the environment."

Where Have All The Good Gods Gone?

Steven Kotler — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:07:45 -0700

As I promised in my last post, this one will look at the question of sport as ritual.

It helps to start with a definition.

According to the folks at Dictionary.com, a ritual is an “established procedure for a religious or other rite or an observance or set form of public worship.”

Anthropologist Evan M. Zuesse expanded these ideas, saying we can understand as ritual those “conscious, voluntary, repetitious, stylized and symbolic actions that are centered on cosmic structures and/or sacred presences.”

While these notions are a good place to start, they don’t really get at the full scope of the matter. For that, I’m turning to the descriptions offered by the neuroscientist Andrew Newberg and the late psychiatrist Eugene D’Aquili in their "The Mystical Mind."

Their considerably more technical definition points out that ritual is a “stereotyped or repetitive behavior” done over and over that results “in some greater coordination between individuals towards some common goal or purpose.”

While their version offers less religiosity, it provides a deeper level of biological coherence. As I previously mentioned, in nature, ritual is everywhere (see Why We Crave Ritual). By expanding their definition to include causation, Newberg and D’Aquili have provided a foundation that holds true for the dance or bees, the howling rites of wolves and the religious ceremonies of humans (and many other examples as well).

How the dance of bees begets the sacred rites of humans is a topic for another place (if you’re curious, I give a complete run down in Chapter 27 of West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief), but for our purposes the point is that ritual has to be the repletion of a certain type of behavior (which our games clearly are) and those behaviors have to have a point.

So what is the point of the ritual of sport? That depends on which side of the political spectrum you fall on. In his excellent "Sports Illusion, Sports Reality", journalist Leonard Koppett offers these excellent ideas:

For the political right, sport represents the glories of American democracy: competitiveness, loyalty, preoccupation with success, insistence on fair play, and physical exertion. These are, of course, substitutes for free-enterprise, traditional family values and a Puritan work ethic, but that’s mostly beside the point.

Centralists, meanwhile, take a intermediate position. While sports might be the real ‘opiate of the masses’ they’ve also done tremendous good in breaking down the color barriers, providing collegiate opportunities for black athletes, creating tremendous economic benefits and offering plenty of free entertainment (via television).

And this list goes on. Religious fundamentalists find our games a ‘sin-free’ pastimes,‘ while personal fulfillment advocates’ see spectator sports as a good first step: a way to turn watchers into participants.

No matter the meaning, what’s really going on here is an after-the-fact glomming on. As Koppett points out, “Sports reflect social conditions, they don’t cause them.”

Still, this doesn’t seem to matter. As in most sacred rituals, the experience is personal, the meaning societal. What is important is that our games have become substitutes for our religions.

Thusly, they fulfill the twin hallmarks of ritual in nature: they help teach our young and they help coordinate group behavior.

Now, teaching an entire nation that the appropriate thing to do over the weekend is watch football may seem a little suspect, but the Sunday School lesson is one of commonality. In short, if we share the same games then maybe we have other things in common as well.

And this gets at the one thing left out of all the above definitions of ritual: that they all serve to increase our sense of community and to decrease our inborn xenophobia.

In short: it's easier to love our neighbor if we're cheering with our neighbor. Meaning the ritual of sport has become a substitute for the ritual of killing, and what could be better than that?

Why We Crave Ritual

Steven Kotler — Sat, 03 May 2008 06:26:17 -0700

I didn’t grow up a sport’s fan, have lived in too many places to have anything resembling a hometown team and used to drive a car with a ‘Kill Your Television’ bumper-sticker on it. These are not things scream basketball addict. But every spring, come NBA playoff season, I spend an unreasonable amount of time watching a game I’ve never even played.

At a basic level, humans enjoy playing sports because humans enjoy survival. We play fight as kids in case we have to real fight as adults. But we don’t become better fighters watching slam dunks, so that doesn’t really explain my sports-on-the-tube addiction.

Sure, in polyglot America, our games are our common ground. We no longer live in tiny villages. We meet all kinds of folks, with all kinds of pasts. Sports are what guys who don’t know each other talk about. Easy, safe male bonding: always good for the tribe. But ten minute Sport’s Center will do that trick, so why the endless hours of game watching?

Sociologists, appropriately, call the above mentioned idea: sport as a socializing agent. Other popular theories include sport as an agent of control, an agent of assimilation, an agent of group identification. Some have argued that, since thrill-seeking is an inborn trait, sports provide a method of controllable thrills. And while this list goes on, I consistently find it incomplete.

On a strictly personal basis, I live in the middle-of-nowhere New Mexico. My neighbors are farmers and most are Hispanic farmers—meaning their game is soccer much more than basketball.

Beyond them, the vast majority of my friends are uninterested in organized sports (preferring skiing, skateboarding, surfing and other such individual pastimes) so there’s little opportunity to bond over something they generally find annoying.

And, as I’m Jewish, we’re not a minority group known to bond over our athletic abilities.

But over the past few years a new theory has been quietly developing and that theory holds some merit. This new idea is that sport is ritual and our draw towards it follows a complicated history with peculiar evolutionary roots.

In nature ritual is everywhere in nature. Whales breech, bees dance, wolves dance. In their famous 1979, Spectrum of Ritual, the ethnologist Charles Laughlin and the psychiatrist and anthropologist Eugene D’ Aquili tried to figure out why.

Evolutionary theory teaches us that the brain’s primary function is to keep an organism alive and reproducing and everything from love to hunger is an expression of this primary function. The proximity of a viable sexual partner produces lust, much as the way a shortage of glucose in the bloodstream produces hunger. Sex and eating, by sating these needs, produces an accompanying pleasure response. Without this, we would stop mating and stop eating.

Laughlin and D’Aquili reasoned that as our brain evolved, this chain of command lengthened. Eating became associated with cooking which became associated with hunting and so forth. In this chain of association, it wasn’t just eating that produced pleasure; it was the ritual that surrounded eating that produced pleasure.

The reasoning here is that as our species evolved and grew our nutritional needs grew alongside us. No longer could we anchor ourselves to a rock like a barnacle and eat whatever floated by. If a wolf ate only the stuff that wandered into its mouth, it would be dead within a week. To sustain all that body mass, wolves had to know how to hunt.

And it was wolves that Laughlin and D’Aquili studied. They discovered that before hunting, wolves go through a ceremonial tail-wagging, group-howling session. Since wolves often stalk animals much larger then themselves, this ritualistic activity helped them coordinate the hunt.

From this, they argued that ritual serves two important biological functions: it helps coordinate group behavior and it teaches the young how to behave. Which is why ritual is everywhere in nature; it’s part of the engine that drives nature forward. And for this reason, they deduced that ritual has become a “cognitive imperative.”

And just like every other healthy adaptation turned cognitive imperative, we still crave it. Why do we like to go dancing? Wolves dance together to coordinate the hunt. We used to dance to pray to the gods for a good hunt. And the brain can’t really tell the difference. Which is why dancing causes the release of so many feel-good and expensive to produce neurochemicals; it’s our hunter-gather brain’s way of saying keep doing this thing you’re doing because it just might save your life some day.

But we no longer hunt our meat in groups. We no longer pray to the same gods for the meat we will soon hunt. In fact, in our modern times, unless you’re a Pentecostal Christian or a teenage raver, ours is no longer a world built on shared ecstatic experience.

But our brain, which has not adapted as fast as our society, still craves the ‘cognitive imperative’ of ritual. We crave that neurochemical release, but our modern lives rarely provide it.

But watching sport’s on TV does.

Spectator sports follow all of the standard definitions of ritual (more on this in my next blog) and my addiction to hoops is nothing more than the poor man’s substitute for this old school necessity.

A fact that helps explain why, when the team I'm rooting for wins, my body is flooded with feel-good neurochemicals. And, since the production of neuorchemicals also produces new receptor sites for those neurochemicals to bond to, a chain of chemical craving is set up. My brain believes this combination serves to reinforce a pattern of behavior critical to my survival.

Thus, night after night, I am compelled to watch basketball is because a trick of evolution has taught my brain to believe this watching is critical to my survival.

And really, who am I to disagree.

Why We Love Losers

Steven Kotler — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 09:45:38 -0700

On any given Sunday. They don’t play the games on paper. These might be sport’s clichés, but they’re not wrong.

The perpetual center of our games is their always unpredictable nature. Spectator sports are the only true form of spontaneous entertainment we have left. And that sense of spontaneity, the feeling that at any given moment, anything can happen, lends much credence to a particular American value—that of infinite possibility.

Infinite possibility is the potential energy of spontaneity, the secret promise of sport. This is the idea that on any given Sunday David can slay Goliath. It’s the idea that an untested fifth round draft pick can lead a team of aging veterans to the Superbowl, as Tom Brady did in 2001. Anyone can be champion. Money doesn’t influence the outcome of the game and the reason the New York Yankees went to five of the last ten World Series has nothing to do with their also having the highest payroll in baseball. It’s the idea upon which this country is built: that anyone can rise to greatness, that every kid can play in the NBA, that we’re all potentially presidential material.

It helps explain why most of our sporting nation is currently rooting for the Atlanta Hawks.

The Hawks are the most improbable of stories: a mostly mediocre basketball team who backed into the playoffs with a sub-500 record. And for the first two games of their series with the seemingly unstoppable Boston Celtics they played about as well as one would expect: loosing the first two games (out of a best of seven series) by double-digits.

But something happened in Game 3 and that something has kept on happening in Game 4. Tonight, the Celtics will square off against the newly energized Hawks in a Game 5 that was never supposed to happen. And damn near every b-ball fan in the country will be cheering them on—but did you ever wonder why?

The psychology of the underdog has been a mostly unstudied phenomena until late last year, when a team led by University of South Florida psychologist Joseph Vandello, began exploring the reasons we cheer for the long shot.

Vandello looked not only at sports, but also at politics. For instance, in one study which used the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an example, participants were given the same essay about the history of the area, but two different maps. One showing Palestine as smaller, the other a diminished Israel. In every case, subjects decided to side with the smaller—thus underdog—representation.

In fact, across the boards, no matter what the facts were, participants chose the underdogs to win.

As far as why? The researchers favor two ideas. The first is that cheering for those who are seen as disadvantaged seems to ignite our innate sense of fairness and justice. The second is the across-the-boards belief that the underdog needs to outwork the top dog in order to succeed.

I think there's a third basic catagory that they missed: specifically the idea that if "they" (meaning the underdog) can do it, so can I. It's not that we don't value hard work and solid justice, but we value them more if it means we too are eligible for a miracle.

Rooting for the underdog is about transference, about the transference of possibility. We want the impossible to happen not just for its own sake, but for what it might mean for us.

Which is to say: Go Hawks!

Don't Think, Just Play

Steven Kotler — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:04:19 -0700

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially in sports.

Witness yesterday’s basketball game between the Philadelphia Seventy-Sixers and the Detroit Pistons. On paper this should have been no contest. The Pistons won 59 games this year, giving them the third best record in the NBA. They have three all-star players compared to Philadelphia’s none and more playoff experience than just about any other team in the league, especially a team as young as the Sixers.

And all that experience was on display for the first three quarters of yesterday’s game. But with 6:05 left in the third quarter, the Sixers started to rally. And never stopped.

Erasing a 15 point deficit—a near Herculean comeback against a team that plays defense as well as Detroit—the Sixers rose to a 90-86 victory, destroying the Piston’s home court advantage and stunning much of the basketball world in the process.

Afterwards, the buzz round the league centered around one idea: the Piston’s bad habit of playing down to their opponents.

Everyone familiar with sport is familiar with the phenomena. When a great team plays a great team the result is often, well, greatness (the best example of this being this weekend’s double overtime contest between the Suns and the Spurs). But put a fabulous squad on the court against mediocrity (the Sixers finished the season two games below 500) and the results are often disastrous.

So what the hell’s going on here?

According to Temple University sports psychologist Michael Sachs (a Philly fan no less), the party line is that “a team as good as the Pistons, particularly one that’s older and more experienced, gets a comfortable lead and then figures: 1) it can coast to victory and 2) the other team should have enough 'sense' to give up.”

Alas, as Sachs also points out, “the Sixers are too young to realize this and kept fighting back. The playing down to your opponent piece is playing at a level just above how one's opponent does, 'secure' in the knowledge one can beat him/her. Of course, occasionally this security is misplaced and one loses.”

The problem here is one that’s common in all sports: over-thinking.

Focusing on the score or the fact that one should win the game often trumps a player’s intuitive response patterns (so-called muscle memory) that allows them to just play their game. The minute they begin playing someone else’s game is the minute that they’ll begin to lose.

The moral of the story is don’t think, just play. Of course, like most morals, this one is often easier in theory than practice.

Courage, Happiness and Why Children Should Be Allowed To Break Bones

Steven Kotler — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 05:44:42 -0700

By the time I was eighteen, sports had taken their toll. I’d gotten a concussion while horseback riding, broken my arm in three places skateboarding, bruised my tailbone playing football, cleaved my patella in two skiing, fractured my other patella slightly while diving, and had much of my face rebuilt after a martial arts tournament fight went horribly wrong.

All in all I’d say it was a productive childhood.

I mention all of these things because my cohort, Lybi Ma, recently posted a blog (Checking Not Whacking) bemoaning the recent rise in childhood sports injuries. It seems everything from concussions to knee injuries have become commonplace among kids—well, good job kids.

The one factor that has meant more to my life as an adult than any other is “courage.” Which is to say, without those broken bones and other childhood discomforts I don’t think I would have ended up where I am today (and what I mean by where I am today is happy).

That’s right, for me courage is completely and utterly entwined with happiness. I don’t think you get one without the other and—while this is about as unscientific an idea as can be found (meaning it’s based entirely on personal experience) it's as much of a creed as I have.

In my last book (West of Jesus: Surfing, Science and the Origins of Belief), I argued that my personal secret to happiness has always been to find the thing that’s scaring me and head straight for it. And, truthfully, that’s not all that far away from the “technical” definition of courage.

Psychologists often define courage as a combination of persistence and fear or, more accurately, as persistence in the face of fear. This is not a new idea. Aristotle defined courage as something one develops by doing courageous acts. In other words, Aristotle felt that fear was an innate part of courage (you have to move through the fear to get the courage) and more modern psychologists do not disagree.

In 1990, psychologist SJ Rachman defined courage using three different components of fear: the feeling of apprehension, the physical sweat palms, weak knees response, and the behavioral fight or flight response. Rachman decided that courage is the uncoupling of fear’s components from action, meaning you resist the behavioral response (you don’t run away), despite the profound discomfort produced both by subjective/emotional reactions and by our physical reactions.

In other words, get scared, but still plow on through.

And this isn’t just my opinion. Study after study after study has also found that most of the time fear is inversely proportional to happiness. Which is to say, the road towards joy is paved in courage. Or, as Anais Nin once wrote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”

The point here is not only that kids should be allowed to break bones, but parents should learn to not mind. Those broken bones are the only way to learn that the thing you’re afraid of is by no means as bad as the fear itself.

Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant and Basketball's Placebo effect

Steven Kotler — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:01:13 -0700

What’s with the sleeves?

Back in 2000, after having surgery on his elbow, Allen Iverson started wearing what is now known as a “basketball sleeve.”

Running from wrist to bicep, the sleeve is really nothing more than an oversized compression bandage. But long after his joint healed, Iverson kept on wearing his “sleeve.”

Rumors started flying: maybe it helps with his shooting (he does have over 20,000 points for his career), maybe because he’s too superstitious to take it off or maybe—as a quick tour around the rumor mill known as the World Wide Web points out—because he used to be a Crip and the powers that be at the NBA have decreed ‘no gang tattoos allowed.’

Then, a few years ago, Denver Nugget Carmelo Anthony picked up on the same fashion statement. Again he donned the sleeve post-surgery. Again, he chose not to take it off long after his appendage had healed.

Well, this year Kobe Bryant got into the mix with a sleeve all his own. Again, with his MVP-esque seasons, the rumors started flying as to why.

I mention all of this because of a similar ‘sleeve’ incident all my own. When I was fifteen years old, I split my patella in a skiing accident. There’s nothing to do for a split patella other than wait. And don a knee sleeve.

I wore mine clear into my thirties. Whenever I went skiing, the sleeve went with me. Nevermind that the patella was all healed up by the time I got out of college, I found that on the days I went naked, the knee consistently throbbed.

Adding all these things together and I started to wonder: could these sleeves be functioning in the same way as placebos in medicine?

The “placebo effect” was popularized in 1955, when H.K. Beecher evaluated 15 clinical trials concerned with 15 different diseases and found that in all of them, 35 percent of 1,082 patients were made symptom free by placebos alone.

Since than, studies have found the effect even greater. For certain conditions like chronic pain, gastric ulcers and heart ailments, placebos bring relief to nearly 60 percent of all patients. In fact, when it comes to depression, these "fakes" have a better batting average than most major SSRIs.

But these basketball sleeves are not being used to cure a disease. Rather, they may be being used to prevent another injury. Could it be that placebos work for prevention as well?

I didn’t know, so I got in touch with Dr. Howard Brody, author of ‘The Placebo Response,’ to find out.

Brody pointed out that there are a number of scientific studies that show remedies like Vitamin C and Echinacea do not prevent colds when subjected to randomized, controlled, double-blind trials. Still, many people take these and swear by them.

“We know that among the variables in human function that appears readily able to respond to the placebo effect is IgA—the immunoglobulin that is present in mouth and nose mucus that provides the first line of defense against germs like cold viruses.,” says Brody. “So we might postulate (but cannot prove) that these "placebos" stimulate IgA production, and thereby actually do help reduce the number of colds people suffer, without any "direct" chemical effect taking place-- i.e. the placebo effect at work. So in this instance we have a clear mechanism by which placebos could work for prevention.”

That said, Brody also feels that something like a sleeve might really be superstition much more than scientific. “If we get too overly romanticized about the response,” he continues, “then the whole universe becomes a placebo.”

Though, when I ran down my experience with the ‘knee sleeve,’ he had agreed that in my case, the effect definitely fell into the placebo category.

I guess, to paraphrase Ben Franklin, in some cases “an ounce of placebo is worth a pound of cure.”

The Annals of the Dumb and Dangerous

Steven Kotler — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 06:43:56 -0700

The first mountain I ever ran down was Masada. I was eighteen years old and in Israel. Located on the eastern edge of the Judean Desert, overlooking the Dead Sea, Masada was built around 35 BCE by Herod the Great and earned its place in historical lore after the first Jewish-Roman war. This was about 66 CE. When the Romans finally took the mountain, they discovered that the 936 Jewish inhabitants had set all the buildings on fire and committed mass suicide rather than becoming Roman slaves.

Masada is flat-topped and dirt brown and looks like someone took a giant molar and shoved it root first into the desert. It is 1300 feet high. The trail that runs from top-to-bottom is a vertiginous curve of switch-backs bordered by nasty cliffs. There were about eight of us milling around the top, looking for something to do. I don’t quite remember who proposed the race or who shouted “GO!” but I remember never having run so fast before.

The path was steep enough that within twenty feet of starting our steps had become leaps. About fifty feet later, leaps had become bounds. I was clearing eight to ten feet per and stopping was out of the question. I remember that what had started out as something fun to do, had become a bit more dire. I also remember that by the end of the first switchback, roughly two hundred yards down the trail, the world around me had melted away.

Thought and feeling and past history and future concerns were completely gone. Years later, I would come to understand why this happens. That understanding came from a guy named David Klinger, a criminologist at the University of St. Louis, Missouri. Klinger, as he explains in his excellent "Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force," wanted to know why policemen in gun battles often fail to hear shots going off in their ears and frequently report seeing bullets entering the people they’re shooting at.

After all, bullets travel faster than the eye can normally see, while gun shots are loud as hell. Turns out that during a so-called “adrenaline response” the brain funnels energy to the parts that need it most and away from those not critical. The loss of hearing comes because the ears have been essentially turned off, while the brain’s perception of time—which is modulated by the neurochemical dopamine (dopamine is also released during an adrenaline rush for its performance-enhancing capabilities)—has slowed down.

Dopamine is also one of the brain’s main happy drugs, which helps explain the euphoria that accompanied that first mountain run.

In my early 20s, I lived in San Francisco and kept up this mountain running tradition. A good friend and I would hike Mount Tamalpais, in nearby Mill Valley, about once a week. We would sit atop for a few minutes and then sprint straight down. Tam is considerably higher than Masada (a 2571-foot peak) and the way down significantly more varied. The last portion of the run took us through a pine forest.

It’s been twenty years since those days, but I remember that pine forest almost exactly. I can see the narrow spacing of the trees and the light dappling down through their crowns and the reason I can remember all of it some two decades later also comes down to dopamine.

One of the other functions of this neuro-chemical, as was discovered by Michael Goldberg and Robert Wurtz at the NIH, is to modulate attention. Technically, dopamine helps stabilize our spatial map (our internal, multisensory representation of extrapersonal space) and cement experiences into memory.

This happens for a lot of reasons, but a very simple explanation is that emotions exist to tag experiences for either discarding or long-term storage. The stronger the experience (thus the more neurochemicals like dopamine released) the better chance that experiences gets saved for review. Put yourself into heaps of danger (by, say, running down a mountain), and the brain is going to record every step just in case a situation this precarious ever occurs again.

The last time I ran down a mountain was eight years ago, in Madagascar. I was there studying lemurs with the primatologist Patricia Wright and had decided to go for a hike with Wright’s daughter Amanda. We were in the high hills surrounding the World Heritage Site known as Ranomafana National Park when a lightning storm broke out. For reasons that remain unclear, the lightning was purple. That didn’t diminish the threat. Researchers working in Madagascar had the habit of getting struck by lightning atop these same hills and we didn’t want to risk it. By the time the second flash occurred, Amanda had taken off at a sprint and I had rushed to follow.

Now Amanda was raised in the jungles of Peru and the forests of Madagascar, but had spent the past decade going to college in New York and later working at a bank. She wasn’t supposed to be in shape for this kind of dash. I, on the other hand, had spent the past two years hiking and climbing and skiing and snowboarding and doing an assortment of other such activities. I should have smoked her, but I could barely catch her.

This woman had spent her childhood running down mountains. When we took off down that muddy, hardscrabble trail, I felt like I was chasing a Billy goat. As a sportswriter, I had spent years chasing professional athletes around mountains, but none of them had ever moved as fast as Amanda. To say it was otherworldly is an understatement. I watched her leap from a cliff’s edge, flip her body sideways and plant her feet on the side of a tree some fifteen feet off the ground, then flip around and bounce off another as she worked her way down to the ground. It was an early display of the sport now known as parkour. This too was dopamine at work. And it was astounding.

About six months after that trip I got very sick with Lyme disease and spent the better portion of two years in bed. Recovery was hard. I thought my mountain running days long behind me, but it’s been six years since then and I now live in northern New Mexico—a place dotted by tall peaks. I’ve been eyeing them lately, thinking it might be time to lace up my sneakers and see what’s what.

Besides performance-enhancement, memory modulation and general happiness, dopamine is one of the most addictive substances on earth. Cocaine, often considered the most craven of drugs, does little more than flood the brain with dopamine. A fact that helps explain why, at age 41, I would decide to start running down mountains again.

For the dopamine of course. You just can’t beat that rush.

When Falling Isn't An Option

Steven Kotler — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:14:26 -0700

On Friday April 11, at the Grove in Anaheim, the surf company Billabong is going to give away $50,000 for what many consider to be the craziest award in sport’s history.

Technically known as the Billabong XXL Global Big Wave Award, the prize money is distributed in categories such as “Biggest Wave” and “Monster Tube” and other such monikers that are mostly unfathomable to those outside the surf community.

To give you an idea of what these awards mean, it helps to first understand the size of waves that most surfer’s ride. An average big day in California is roughly in the double-overhead range.

“Double overhead” is a technical terms that means exactly like it sounds: that the wave in question is roughly twice the size of an average surfer—or somewhere around 12 feet tall. And only very good surfers paddle out when waves get to that size.

In 2007, the Billabong XXL “Biggest Wave” award went to a California surfer named Greg Long for riding a 65 foot high wave at a South African surf break known as “Dungeons.” 65 feet is bigger than a six-story building. Riding one means being able to handle speeds in excess of 30 miles-per-hour with absolutely no margin for error for the simple reason that, at that size, most surfers don’t live through their errors.

Why one would want to risk everything on a wave is a question that has lately been getting some attention.

About a year back, Cal State Fullerton researcher Mike Boyd started asking similar questions about skateboarders. What he wanted to understand was how a skateboarder’s mental profile compared to that of other athletes.

So Boyd spent a number of years administering what is known as the “Profile of Mood States (POMS).” Developed in 1964 and unchanged since 1971, POMS is comprised of six different mood scales: Tension-Anxiety, Depression-Dejection, Anger-Hostility, Fatigue, Vigor, and Confusion-Bewilderment.

Using this scale, most elite athlete’s tend to have certain traits in common, including scoring low for depression, tension, fatigue, confusion and anger, and scoring very high for “task orientation,” which means they excel because of an internal need to push themselves, rather than a desire to compete against others.

This leads to what has been called “the Iceberg Profile,” a representation of this outcome that runs below normal for all of the negative traits (the submerged portion of the iceberg) and contains one giant spike (the floating berg) in the middle of the graph for “vigor.”

This chart has been used to explain why some less-physically talented athletes occasionally achieve greater success than peers possessing greater physical ability.

What Boyd discovered is that elite skateboarders share this exact same profile.

This month, another Fullerton professor, Lenny Wiersma, has decided to do similar work with big wave surfers. One of the things about surfing that caught Wiersma’s attention was what happened in the final heat of another big wave contest, the January 12, Maverick’s competition (Maverick’s is a legendary monster near Half-Moon Bay, California).

There were 6 surfers left in the final heat, going for $30,000 in prize money. Rather than competing against one another for the cash, the surfers decided to split it—no matter who won.

This would be the rough equivalent of A-Rod splitting up the $28 million he’ll make this year among teammates if the Yankees win the World Series.

Which is to say, those surfers deciding to split their prize money is, um, some pretty a-typical behavior for today’s superstar sportsmen. Then again, riding 65 foot waves is some pretty a-typical behavior for anyone who wants to live through the afternoon.

Which is exactly why Wiersma decided to start his research in the first place.