Daedalus, a brilliant Athenian architect, was commissioned by King Minos of Crete to design an elaborate and complicated labyrinth. The resulting maze was so tricky and confusing that once you were inside, it was nearly impossible to navigate without assistance from the gods themselves. Then, to punish Daedalus for providing a secret clue to escape the labyrinth, the King had both him and his son Icarus imprisoned. But it’s hard to keep a good man down. Daedalus and his son escaped and hid on the shore near the rocky cliffs of Crete overlooking the sea. While hiding, Daedalus looked longingly at the seagulls that circled the beaches. Too bad he and Icarus couldn’t just fly off like the birds – unless… Daedalus decided to build two pairs of massive seagull wings so he and his son could escape.

While Daedalus designed the wings, Icarus was to gather supplies. Little by little, Icarus collected thousands of seagull feathers, branches, twine, and pounds of beeswax for the project. Daedalus fashioned the wings, bound them together with the thread and molded them with the beeswax.

Before their escape, Daedalus went over the plan. “Now this is important,” he warned. “Follow my EXACT path.

In the summer of 2014, I was invited to Twin Falls, Idaho, to speak to a group of mental health counselors. I was there to discuss the details of the new psychological diagnostic system. Having never been to Idaho, I expected to encounter super-nice people, incredible landscapes, and potatoes. Twin Falls had something much more thrilling in store for me.

As I greeted the workshop participants, I mentioned my interest in sensation-seeking. One person chimed in, “Oh, then you’ll want to visit The Bridge.” I was confused. How exhilarating could a bridge be? Over the course of my visit, one person after another mentioned The Bridge.

The Bridge turned out to be the I. B. Perrine Bridge, which is famous for being one of the only bridges in North America where you can BASE jump year-round without a permit. Imagine, jumping off of a bridge with a parachute whenever you’d like. People travel from all over the world to The Bridge to BASE jump.

Cliff diving isn’t a typical activity for anyone, much less a person who is afraid of heights. But Mike,1 a 20-year-old intern living in Atlanta, does it as often as he can, despite this fear. He’s also gone skydiving at least four times. The first time, he was a little disappointed. “I actually wasn’t scared at any point, which was weird.” The second time Mike actually told his guide, “The last guy failed to scare me, so I want you to scare me.” Even by his own reckoning, this isn’t something you should say to a skydiving coach. I couldn’t help but ask, “Well, did he scare you?” “Yeah,” he said, “he went about it very cleverly. Beforehand he told me that when they’ve got somebody who isn’t cooperating (apparently some people will grab the guide’s arms or something when they should be pulling the chute), they spin the person around really fast. Because this increases G-force, the person passes out and the instructor can get them safely to the ground. So we’re in the middle of free fall and that is basically what he does to me. He takes my hand and bends it down slightly, so I start spinning extraordinarily fast in one direction.

Where does all of this leave us? Is high sensation-seeking a superpower, as illustrated in the last chapter, or is it a super peril, as discussed earlier? What of the questions I set out to answer in this book? Are high sensation-seekers different than the rest of us? Is there something wrong with them? Is being a high sensation-seeker dangerous? Should we try to change their behavior?