Adrenaline : What gets you pumped?

Question

I saved a guy from being crushed between a wall and a car once. There was no time to hesitate, I put myself in danger but felt no fear whatsoever

In sports I will sometimes see the perfect shot and execute it as if it's happening in slow motion

With a woman it will seem I am observing from somewhere else

What's happening? And how can I do it more often?

Answer 1

I'll tell you what gets me pumped.  Running from the cops.

Answer 2

Excitement, fear, anger - those are the main emotions which trigger an adrenaline rush, however there are many which can do it also but not as frequently.

When you see the perfect shot, you get excited, which is stimulus for release of adrenaline by the adrenal gland. It is released upon these emotions via a nerve impulse from the brain.

Adrenaline can also make you more perceptive of your environment, therefore the brain will use other senses more than it normally does, from this heightened attention to the other senses of the body you can be very aware of your own position and situation - enough so that your brain can visualise your body as though from outside.

In some situations, hormones can cause adrenaline release.

Answer 3

Its the adrenal hormone that only secretes when your in the mood of emergency or urgency

Answer 4

Adrenaline is only released when your body feels that the stimulus is threatening or when you are in an emergency situation. The idea of emotions is still unknown because it is so complex, but currently there is a nice amount of information known about it so far. Anywa the "fear" pathway has to deal with the frontal lobe [DMPFC, ACC] (decision making), hippocampus (memory), and amygdala (fear). These brain structure act together to make you act towards a stimulus or not. After stimulating these regions, the message is sent down the spinal cord toward the Autonomic nervous system (which then relays toward the sympathetic nervous system) for fight or flight actions. You choose to fight. Your Frontal lobe decided that saving a life is more important and regardless of fear, you acted out the action. But what if a car was coming straight towards you while you were running to the person to save him? Your frontal lobe now needs to reexamine the situation and decide to still save the person or run away. The idea of slow motion, deals with more center of the brain structures (I am not sure exactly). But your brain will in a sense, slow down time (not literally) for you to completely analyze the situation. I cannot explain the out-of-body experience.

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I believe this is your brain trying to analyze cetain situations completely before making actions. A good general source can be found on the discovery channel, whne they talk about the human mind. It has simple inforamtion for the general population to understand. Maybe you can find this on the website for the discovery channel.

To do more of it, put yourself in more life-threatening situations, i guess.

If you are that worried about it, go see a neuropsychologist, who can come up with better explainations than I can becasue they are trained to deal with this type of information.

good luck.