Episode 35: The Psychology of Extreme Sports
November 14th, 2007 at 3:48 am
Time for a little fun. I know you’ve asked yourself this question: why do people engage in those dangerous sports like hang gliding, bungee jumping and rock climbing? Would you believe it might have something to do with neurotransmitters and something called Monoamine Oxidase? In this video episode we learn about Sensation Seekers. Come along for the ride.
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- Darn! The video I made with the chasing snow mobiles using the Stuntman video game didn’t come out looking so good in this podcast. In case you want to see the video, I’ve embedded it below. I’m still thinking about ways to use machinima for educational purposes. If you’ve got any ideas let’s talk about it.
Click on this image to use the drag-and-drop activity to demonstrate neurotransmitter movement across the synapse.
Resources for this Podcast
- Personality Psychology website at Arcadia. This site has a lot of great resources on personality. Highly recommended.
- Take the sensation-seeking scale here.
- Lots of resources on personality can be found at the Personality Pedagogy site.
- Good article here from the HealthyPlace website on monoamine oxidase and it’s role in depression.
- A nice overview of Sensation Seeking can be found in Motivation Theories and Pinciples 5th edition by Robert Beck.
- Biopsychology by John Pinel has some excellent illustrations and extensive explanations on how neurotransmitters work.
Media Resources for this Episode
- Thanks to the band 3Kisses for allowing me to use “It’s Not About You” for the soundtrack to my extreme snowmobile chase.
- Extreme Bungee on YouTube.
- Here’s the YouTube video showing the extreme hang gliding video featured in this episode.
- The snowmobile chase machinima was made with the video game Stuntman: Ignition
- Here’s a link to one of the many machinima sites.
- I created the neurotransmitter animations using Adobe Flash
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