The mechanics behind the excitement elixir, adrenaline
You take off the shirt and find the heart,” is one of many unforgettable lines in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. It is voiced during a scene in which hit man John Travolta and a drug dealer grapple with how to revive Uma Thurman who’s lying unconscious after having mistakenly snorted heroin instead of cocaine. There’s dried blood in her nose and she has stopped breathing. In desperation, Travolta slams a syringe full of adrenaline straight into her heart. Like Lazarus rising from the dead, Thurman wakes up, gasping for breath.
Ever since its discovery and isolation—the process spanning over a century of research—adrenaline has been accorded preternatural powers. The hormone, which the body secretes in times of intense fear, anger or stress, can resuscitate, revitalise and revive the heart. Or so popular culture would have us believe. It has become part of our emotional lexicon, and reduced to a cliché: Seek an ‘adrenaline rush’; crave an ‘adrenaline high’; experience life in high definition with a ‘shot of adrenaline’; hooked to fear-fuelled thrills like an ‘adrenaline junkie’.
Just don’t expect any miracles. If you’re being chased by a cheetah, and the only time you’ve ever run in your life is to grab the last breakfast donut on a cafeteria counter, you’re still going to be the cheetah’s dinner. In his book, Extreme Fear, The Science of Your Mind in Danger, science writer Jeff Wise shows how the right dose of fear can help us discover our inner hero. “When we find ourselves under intense pressure, fear unleashes reserves of energy that normally remain inaccessible. We become, in effect, superhuman,” he writes. Our Spidey senses don’t just tingle, they’re on overdrive. But he adds a caveat. “There’s a limit to how fast and how strong fear can make us.”
(This story appears in the May-June 2014 issue of ForbesLife India. To visit our Archives, click here.)