When I first began my journey to understand high sensation-seekers, I honestly wondered what was wrong with them. People who threw themselves off of buildings and out of airplanes, chose the most unusual thing on the menu, and would pick a topic of conversation that they knew would cause conflict? Who does that?

Could Freud be right? Maybe Thanatos was stronger in high sensation-seekers and created an unruly, pandemonium-loving personality. Was sensation-seeking some kind of death wish? Were high sensation-seekers simply lackadaisical about the beauty and fragility of life? Were they actually chaos junkies or adrenaline addicts? Or was high sensation-seeking a neurological impairment that makes people want to BASE jump or rollerblade downhill in city traffic or try ever more challenging, even poisonous exotic foods? I was baffled. It seemed, at the time, that what they really sought was chaos.

Cindy was pretty excited when the guy she’d been dating for the last few months offered to fly her to Texas to visit her relatives. After all, she’d never been in a single-engine airplane before. The trip from Illinois to Texas would take a while. Single-engine airplanes fly considerably slower than commercial ones. Instead of zooming at 540 miles per hour you putter along at around 80, albeit in a mostly straight line.

During the long flight she peppered Tom with questions. “You know, the way you do when you’re getting to know somebody and learning about what they’re interested in,” she explained.

Hours later Tom tapped her on the shoulder. Cindy was surprised. “I figured we were nearly there, except I looked down, and all I saw was water. I didn’t know what we were doing out over open water. He had pulled us out over the Gulf of Mexico and lowered our altitude a bit. ‘We’re clearly not going to land there,’ I thought.” Then Tom does the unthinkable, he stalls the plane – deliberately. “We’re in a single-engine plane over the ocean and he stalls it!” she explained with panic in her voice.

Imagine plodding through a pool full of beef stew: thick, murky, and carrot-filled. Now add the rushing currents of a storm surge and you have an idea of black water. There’s zero visibility and chunks of debris fly about. Extreme scuba diving in black water during the huge tidal surge on the east coast that came with Hurricane Sandy was not something even the most fearless high sensation-seeking people would have done. For Jason this isn’t a hobby. It’s his job. For the last 15 years, he has been braving conditions like these and worse to fulfill his life’s passion and profession: to discover new species and better understand ancient life.

Jason’s career is far from typical. He is a mechanical engineer, project strategist, paleontologist, and runs a non-profit. He’s been on archeology digs. And then there is his diving, which facilitates the deep need behind all of these endeavors – an insatiable desire to discover new things.

In Alice in Wonderland, Alice follows a white rabbit down a rabbit hole and then her strange, trippy journey begins. The white rabbit represents an idea or concept which could lead to discovery. It actually pops up in many places including the Matrix films, Star Trek, Jurassic Park, and Stephen King novels. It’s also the pen name of a 24-year-old high sensation-seeking adventure blogger who views herself as a white rabbit open to new and different ways to do things.1

“The white rabbit doesn’t tell you what to do, it shows you,” she explained. And that’s exactly what she has set out to do. Her plan? the world for free.

“It’s an idea that started growing when I started hosting on CouchSurfing,” she said.

Matt Davis was a self-described everyday guy. “I was your average 40-year-old, married with a couple of kids kinda guy that played neighborhood softball and an occasional flag football game. No one would call me obese, but I certainly wasn’t in shape. I couldn’t run more than a mile.” He did his first obstacle course race, the Warrior Dash, because it sounded fun, it seemed manly, and you got a goofy hat and a turkey leg. He wasn’t looking to change his life; his sensation-seeking personality drew him into activities with a high adventure factor.

An obstacle course race (OCR), also known as a mud run, is an adventure endurance race. Swamp Dash and Bash, Tough Mudder and Beast Race are some of the more popular ones. Those who pay to participate can look forward to the muddy mayhem, arctic enema, cry baby, and more. These are the affectionate names mudders give to such activities as belly-crawling underneath barbed wire with your face in the mud, sliding feet first into a pond of icy water, and crawling through a tent filled with tear gas. It all sounds like a scheme that might have been concocted by Dr. Evil to thwart Austin Powers. I guess the sharks with lasers attached to their heads were already booked.

Daedalus, a brilliant Athenian architect, was commissioned by King Minos of Crete to design an elaborate and complicated labyrinth. The resulting maze was so tricky and confusing that once you were inside, it was nearly impossible to navigate without assistance from the gods themselves. Then, to punish Daedalus for providing a secret clue to escape the labyrinth, the King had both him and his son Icarus imprisoned. But it’s hard to keep a good man down. Daedalus and his son escaped and hid on the shore near the rocky cliffs of Crete overlooking the sea. While hiding, Daedalus looked longingly at the seagulls that circled the beaches. Too bad he and Icarus couldn’t just fly off like the birds – unless… Daedalus decided to build two pairs of massive seagull wings so he and his son could escape.

While Daedalus designed the wings, Icarus was to gather supplies. Little by little, Icarus collected thousands of seagull feathers, branches, twine, and pounds of beeswax for the project. Daedalus fashioned the wings, bound them together with the thread and molded them with the beeswax.

Before their escape, Daedalus went over the plan. “Now this is important,” he warned. “Follow my EXACT path.

In the summer of 2014, I was invited to Twin Falls, Idaho, to speak to a group of mental health counselors. I was there to discuss the details of the new psychological diagnostic system. Having never been to Idaho, I expected to encounter super-nice people, incredible landscapes, and potatoes. Twin Falls had something much more thrilling in store for me.

As I greeted the workshop participants, I mentioned my interest in sensation-seeking. One person chimed in, “Oh, then you’ll want to visit The Bridge.” I was confused. How exhilarating could a bridge be? Over the course of my visit, one person after another mentioned The Bridge.

The Bridge turned out to be the I. B. Perrine Bridge, which is famous for being one of the only bridges in North America where you can BASE jump year-round without a permit. Imagine, jumping off of a bridge with a parachute whenever you’d like. People travel from all over the world to The Bridge to BASE jump.

Cliff diving isn’t a typical activity for anyone, much less a person who is afraid of heights. But Mike,1 a 20-year-old intern living in Atlanta, does it as often as he can, despite this fear. He’s also gone skydiving at least four times. The first time, he was a little disappointed. “I actually wasn’t scared at any point, which was weird.” The second time Mike actually told his guide, “The last guy failed to scare me, so I want you to scare me.” Even by his own reckoning, this isn’t something you should say to a skydiving coach. I couldn’t help but ask, “Well, did he scare you?” “Yeah,” he said, “he went about it very cleverly. Beforehand he told me that when they’ve got somebody who isn’t cooperating (apparently some people will grab the guide’s arms or something when they should be pulling the chute), they spin the person around really fast. Because this increases G-force, the person passes out and the instructor can get them safely to the ground. So we’re in the middle of free fall and that is basically what he does to me. He takes my hand and bends it down slightly, so I start spinning extraordinarily fast in one direction.

Where does all of this leave us? Is high sensation-seeking a superpower, as illustrated in the last chapter, or is it a super peril, as discussed earlier? What of the questions I set out to answer in this book? Are high sensation-seekers different than the rest of us? Is there something wrong with them? Is being a high sensation-seeker dangerous? Should we try to change their behavior?