The “high” produced by jumping into the void from a plane with a parachute on your back is due to the secretion of dopamine , a neurotransmitter linked to pleasure that, normally, leaves us wanting to repeat the experience. Faced with the physical "danger" to which we are subjected while practicing extreme sports, adrenaline or epinephrine is also secreted which, in addition to accelerating the heart, accentuates the senses and dilates the pupils so that more light enters through the eyes. Together, adrenaline and dopamine inhibit the frontal area of the brain, which is responsible for control and rational thinking . And they send signals to the hippocampus to store everything that is happening in long-term memory, ideally in great detail. For this reason, when an experience is new, neurons in the hippocampus are activated twice as much as before any other stimulus, and the time seems to last much longer, 36% longer to be exact , according to an estimate published recently in the journal PLoS ONE .
And while we jump, are we aware of the altitude? As Kate Jeffrey concluded in a study published recently in Nature Neuroscience , we perceive distances in two dimensions. Or what is the same, our brain calculates well the distances in a horizontal plane, but does not distinguish between "a little high", "quite high" and "very high".
