The psychology of thrills and chills

Monsters do not thrill psychologist Ken Carter, shown at Netherworld in Stone Mountain. Photo by Kay Hinton.

Psychologist Kenneth Carter is not a fan of Halloween haunted houses. But he has written a book about people who thrive on activities like entering dark passageways, sensing that something unknown and terrifying awaits around the next corner.

“I don’t enjoy having things come out of nowhere,” says Carter, whose long-anticipated book “Buzz! Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils and Adrenaline Junkies” comes out October 31. “Buzz!” both educates and entertains with insights from real-life adventurers, such as a scaler of skyscrapers, known as “Spider Man,” who enjoys hanging from great heights suspended by only his fingers.

Cambridge University Press is publishing the book, the culmination of years of research into high sensation-seeking people by Carter, a professor at Oxford College of Emory University and a self-described low sensation-seeking personality type.

“I love Halloween because it brings both extremes together, there’s something for everyone,” Carter says. “For me, it’s candy corn. That’s my second favorite candy, after Smarties. I enjoy the sweet, silly side of Halloween — not the dark, scary side. I don’t want to get lost in a corn maze or watch ‘The Children of the Corn.’”

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Navigating 'Neuralville': Virtual town helps map brain functions

While a PhD student at Emory, Andrew Persichetti developed experiments based on a virtual town he created, called "Neuralville," above, and a simple video game. "One of my favorite things about being a scientist is getting to design experiments," he says.

Psychologists at Emory University have found that the human brain uses three distinct systems to perceive our environment — one for recognizing a place, another for navigating through that place and a third for navigating from one place to another.

For a new paper, they designed experiments involving a simulated town and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to gain new insights into such systems. Their results, published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), have implications ranging from more precise guidance for surgeons who operate on the brain to better computer vision systems for self-driving cars.

“We’re mapping the functions of the brain’s cortex with respect to our ability to recognize and get around our world,” says Daniel Dilks, Emory associate professor of psychology and senior author of the study. “The PNAS paper provides the last big piece in the puzzle.”

The experiments showed that the brain’s parahippocampal place area is involved in recognizing a particular kind of place in the virtual town, while the brain’s retrosplenial complex is involved in mentally mapping the locations of particular places in the town.

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