Why do I love rollercoasters?

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1:24The only show that goes around loop-de-loops to answer your science questions. I am Alex Lathbridge, and the reason why I'm on this roller coaster is because of a question that's come from one of our listeners in America.

1:44Hey CrowdScience, my name is Gunnar and I am 11 years old. And I live in Washington State, US. Every year, Gunnar and his family make their way to the fair. Now, it's one of the biggest fairs in the USA, and it's got it all. There's food, music, cute animals to look at, a rodeo, and, of course, thrilling fairground rides. Gunnar loves the rides. He just loves that particular feeling you get as they fling you up and down and over. The feeling I get is like a tickling in my tummy when it goes up and down. The feeling is a bit like feeling sick, only different. It definitely makes you want to scream.

2:33In fact, it's a feeling that's a bit hard to put your finger on. It's also like some sort of... It's some sort of... I don't know what it is. And this year, as Gunnar climbed aboard another ride, ready to be flung into the air at terrifying speeds, he felt nagged by a question. I'm like, whoa, this is fun. But why? Good question. Depending on the ride, you might be about to get shot in the air, flipped upside down, rolled over and over, or dropped from a great height. Why would any of that feel good? My question is, why do I like roller coasters? Now, roller coasters have been around a very, very long time.

3:22Andy Hine is the founder of the Roller Coaster Club of Great Britain. If you want to know the history of how these bizarre and terrifying little train rides came to be, Andy is your man. 400 years ago in Russia, they built something called the Ice Mountain, Montana Rusa. And they carved a hill out of ice and you came down on a wooden sledge. A couple hundred years later in Paris, they didn't have enough ice to do that, but seeing how much fun Russians were having, they wanted a bit of it. So they built a wooden version and they put rollers on the track and you still came down on a piece of wood, hence rolling and coasting roller coaster.

4:03The first ride in Paris was called the Promenade Arianne. It was a simple, long, flowing downhill, no ups and downs. It got up to 65 kilometres per hour though. Not bad for a little wooden track. And then 100 years after that in America, in Coney Island, New York, a man called Lamarcus Thompson built what we know as the roller coasters of today. He put the wheels on the car that you sit in and you went up and down like you do now. You only went up and down six feet and you only went a few miles an hour but it was the most scariest thing people had ever seen at the time. These early coasters were all made of wood, but by the end of the 1950s, they'd started to make them out of steel.

4:50And that enabled the rides to go faster and to do more things. They could do banked turns, they could do bigger dips, because the trains were held on the track by wheels on top of the track and underneath the track, which eventually led to inversions. You could go upside down as well, and initially it was a loop, and then it was a corkscrew, and then it was a combination, and then they brought in all sorts of things called bow ties and imaline turns inline twists and so on and now you can go upside down on one ride 14 times these days the vast majority of rides are made of steel but you do still find the odd wooden one here and there roller coaster nerds like andy say they both have their charms depends what you're looking for if you want that intense thrill.

5:37Steel roller coasters can go much faster. There are steel roller coasters that do 150 miles an hour. And positive G-force. Most steel roller coasters, you're planted in the back of your seat. Whereas on a wooden roller coaster, it's all about airtime, negative Gs as you go over the hills. Ah, G-forces. You hear a lot about G-forces when you talk about roller coasters. rides boast about pulling 4 G's or going into 0 G on the drops. Maybe these mysterious G-forces are the key to figuring out why Gunnar is having so much fun out there. But what actually are G-forces? G-force is a measure of acceleration and for everyone listening to us today, unless you're beaming in from space, you essentially have the luxury of listening to us from 1 G, Earth's gravity.

6:27Dr. Shauna Pandya knows plenty about G-forces or gravitational forces, to give them their full name, because she's one of Canada's first commercial astronauts. When we are going through higher positive Gs, we feel like our body is heavier. So at 2 Gs, our body feels twice as heavy. At 6 Gs, our body feels six times as heavy. The higher the G-forces, it's sort of like more gravity. Essentially, yes. And conversely, when we talk about reduced gravity or weightlessness, reduced gravities feel lighter. And the closer we get to microgravity, the closer to weightless we feel. So a positive G-force is that feeling of being suddenly heavy, pushed down into your seat as the roller coaster does a sudden dip.

7:17A negative g-force is the opposite, when you feel lighter, like when a roller coaster drops out from under you and your stomach flips. And you don't just get these feelings on spaceships and roller coasters. When you're in an elevator and you go down for a brief second and you feel like your stomach lifts up into your throat, it's because your gravity vector is changing. And for a brief moment, you're falling at the same rate as your elevator. And so you're temporarily weightless for a split second. You have experienced this weightlessness yourself. Can you explain what that feels like? Yeah, so you can actually experience weightlessness without ever going to space.

7:58The way I have been able to experience weightlessness is through what we call parabolic flight or more colloquially known as the vomit comet. Ah, the vomit comet. No, that's not the name of the latest gut-churning theme park ride. It's an aircraft full of astronauts in training. The way we get prepared for microgravity, the way we prepare for space is through parabolic flight. And so when we're flying in the vomit comet, we are accelerating upwards at a 2G pull. And then we're leveling out and letting the aircraft fall. And we're letting ourselves fall at the same rate as the aircraft. And we're doing this numerous times and we follow what we call a parabolic trajectory.

8:43So we're going up and down and up and down. It's more formally known as a reduced gravity aircraft. And it's an essential part of learning how to cope with the weightlessness of space. And so when that aircraft levels out, you get this 18 to 22 second period of weightlessness or zero G. And I think the best way to summarize it is you're flying. It feels incredible. I've been lucky enough to do 18 parabolic flights to date, and it's impossible not to be in weightlessness and not have a giant smile on your face. What was it like the first time you did it? Yeah, the first time I did it, there was a lot of excitement, a lot of nervousness because the vomit comet, it's called that for a reason.

9:28So right now, sitting here in 1G, the way we perceive up and down, The way we balance is this delicate equilibrium between our eyes, what our inner ears, our vestibular systems perceive as up and down, and what the proprioceptors in our body perceive as our position in space. Once we get to weightlessness, there is a mismatch between those three inputs and our brain gets confused and that can lead to throwing up in the zero G environment. And so the first time I ever flew zero G, that was definitely a consideration. That flight definitely went well. It was a lot of fun and it really solidified that, yes, I definitely want to do this more than one time.

10:07So this could be getting to the heart of our question. The experience of Zero-G famously makes people puke. It messes with our balance and can be pretty unpleasant as an experience. But at the same time, Shauna loved it. And some people pay good money for a ride on the Vomit Comet just for fun. There's companies out there that let people go on these parabolic flights just to experience weightlessness. Yeah, I would do that. I'd do it for a laugh. I guess I'd probably not be good on a parabolic flight. Well, the only way to confirm a hypothesis is to test it. So I think you need to fly a zero G at some point.

10:44Now, weightlessness is one extreme and the other is experiencing these very high G-forces. So where might someone encounter that? Yeah, we've already talked a little bit about this in the context of parabolic flight. So before we can ever get to weightlessness, we have to accelerate. So that would be about 1.8 to 2 Gs. But even then at that point, you can feel your body, your chest is twice as heavy. So you're actually exerting increased effort to breathe. The other places you may find that you're exposed to hypergravity include in a centrifuge, which I've been lucky enough to experience. Can you describe what that is and what it feels like?

11:24Yeah. So in a centrifuge, you are sitting in this kind of tram and there's an arm attaching you from this tram to the center of the room. And basically, the whole point of this contraption is to spin you around really, really fast. And in doing so, it's able to create forces that can replicate these G-forces that we've just been talking about. And for me, I was part of a human study looking at the effects of different G-forces. And the max G-force we experienced was 6Gs front to back. That is so cool. What does 6G actually feel like? Everything feels heavier. So if you're at 6Gs, your chest wall is six times as heavy.

12:11It becomes really hard to breathe. You know, an elephant sitting on your chest is probably the best way to summarize that. Have you ever actually had an elephant sit on your chest? I haven't, but I can imagine that maybe it's a little bit similar to 6Gs. You said you've gone up to maximum 6G. So how much G-force can the human body actually tolerate? Yeah, so when we talk about G-forces, the vector or the direction really matters. And so our heart has to do work against gravity in order to pump blood up to our brains. So you could imagine the most challenging G vector is the one that goes head to feet.

12:50So if we have anything higher than two to three Gs from head to feet, it means our heart has to work a lot harder. Whereas when we have a front to back vector or side to side vector, that's not impacting that blood flow up to our brains as much. So we actually have a higher G tolerance. Fighter pilots go up to 8 to 9 Gs regularly. When we talk about astronauts on re-entry, typically they will expect to have a 3 to 4 G profile. It really depends on the context, the vector, the period of time over which a G-force takes place. So, experiencing fluctuating G-forces on our bodies can be really challenging sensations for astronauts in training.

13:33The intense heaviness of high G-forces can make it hard to breathe, or might even make you pass out. And the light, stomach-flipping feeling of zero G could turn your tummy. But in much smaller doses, these same sensations can also be exhilarating. Perhaps that's the secret to a really fun rollercoaster. Just the right amount of G-forces to give you a thrill, but not so much to make you ill. Parabolic flight is a lot similar to roller coasters in that you're accelerating upwards and then you're falling at the same rate as your vehicle. For that split second, you are briefly weightless. I think, Gunnar, I think you're well on your way towards potentially someday becoming an astronaut or a fighter pilot or maybe even a race car driver.

14:22And I think all of this roller coaster experience that you're getting in now is going to be good experience for your future career. So, some good G-forces are a great way in making a rollercoaster fun. Intense, but not too intense. But Andy Hine, from the Rollercoaster Club of Great Britain, also thinks that how you ride it can make a big difference too. He's got some tips to get the best out of every ride. Andy's rule number one. Raise those arms. If you put your arms up, you stretch the trunk of your body, you give all your internal organs more room to move they don't really it just feels like it but then it exaggerates that feeling of freedom that feeling of air time and that's what i love and that's why it also depends where you sit in a roller coaster andy's rule number two pick your seat carefully where you sit also has an effect on how it rides if you sit in the very front seat of a ride when it comes down the drop you get pushed into the bottom of the dip when it goes around the corner you're pushed into the corner so you get that more positive g's if you sit in the back of the ride you get whipped over the top of the hill so so the front of the train is pulling the back over the hill so you've experienced even more weightlessness and if you want a bit of both you sit in the middle and these third rule and possibly the most important pick your coaster carefully would you rather ride wood or steel if you want to be feeling out of control and have lots of weightlessness you need the wooden coasters but if you love the thrill of speed and going upside down then you need the steel roller coaster and that is why amusement parks really should have one of each at least so that everybody can have fun.

16:12So roller coasters can exert huge physical forces on our bodies, squash us into our seats or make us feel like we're flying out of them. But that still doesn't really explain why Gunnar loves them so much. That's what we'll be trying to figure out next.

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17:22you're listening to crowd science from the bbc world service the show that takes your curiosity on a wild fairground ride seeking the thrill of an answer i'm alex lathbridge we've been riding the ups and downs the barrel rolls the loop-de-loops to find out why our listener gunner loves roller coasters we've discovered the g-forces that give some people a thrill and make others vomit up their lunch but i don't think that's the full story what more are roller coasters doing for our bodies and our brains so for me a roller coaster is a giant industrial machine which has been engineered to process humans a little bit like tins in a factory and to deliver an ingredient and that ingredient is thrill this is professor brendan walker a performance artist a showman and the world's only thrill engineer also a professor of creative industries at middlesex university in the uk thrill is that really lovely warm feeling you get of excitement when something absolutely brilliant happens all of a sudden.

18:43Brendan thinks there might be a link between experiences which give us a thrill and ones which trigger our fight or flight response. So thrill has evolved as a mechanism to reward the persistence of life on Earth. So if we're avoiding danger, if we're avoiding being eaten, there's a level of arousal. So this is the body releases adrenaline, which makes us be able to perform a lot better. And then we also get pleasure because, strangely or not, it is quite pleasurable not to be eaten. Brendan has prepared a little experiment to show us how the science of thrill works. I think I'm about to be the guinea pig.

19:27So I thought this would be a really good way to show how your body's autonomic nervous system works. all right so what we've got here because right now in front of me there is a gray box there is a red balloon and then connected to this gray box there are electrodes going into two little i guess finger cuffs what's going on so um when you're on a roller coaster and you go around your body becomes aroused that fires up the autonomic nervous system which then does several things makes your heart rate go faster makes your pupils dilate makes your breathing quicken but it also starts your fingers to produce sweat and if we pass a small electrical current and it is a small electrical current we can measure the conductance and as the conductance goes up it means that you are becoming more aroused the balloons well that's my little secret but i can get you fitted up first and then I'll come on to the balloons in a minute.

20:33Fantastic. When the autonomic nervous system activates due to stress, excitement or surprise, you begin to sweat, which increases the skin's ability to conduct a tiny applied electrical current. In short, the more sweaty I am, the more aroused I am, which in this experiment you'll be able to hear. Here we go. So turned on. Good. Now, could you start just breathing? Close your eyes. Just do some box breathing. So in and hold for four seconds. There we go. As you are calm, if you've got your eyes closed, if I just stroke your beard like this. So now I'm stroking your beard. You can see that you're becoming aroused.

21:29and that's your body's autonomic nervous system we are programmed to respond to touch we are humans we are primates you know primates like to preen and touch each other it's all about having this emotional connection so now we've got that in the bag okay we're gonna move on to the balloon while it was quite strange to have my beard randomly stroked that was actually relatively tame. Brendan has something else in store. With my eyes closed, I begin to blow into a balloon. The things I do for science. Okay, here we go. Listen to the sound.

22:13It's going up. Keep going. And I'm going to pop it in a minute, in a minute. Okay, this was scary. With my eyes closed and Brendan threatening to pop the balloon right next to my face, I could almost feel my skin tingling with fear. But it was also kind of fun? In today's modern life, we very rarely face the evolutionary challenges that our primate cousins do. And so to feel alive, to feel the thrill, which is a really important sense of life. In fact, people say they've never felt as alive as when they're thrilled. We need to create artificial ways to create those thrilling moments. And you could say that a roller coaster is a superb life simulator if we were to go back to being chimpanzees.

23:04As you might expect from the world's only thrill engineer, Brendan has some pretty specific ideas about what makes a ride truly thrilling. Through studies that I've conducted when I was working with the University of Nottingham, we went around the UK studying different rides, monitoring the arousal and valence of people on rides, looking at their facial expressions and their changes in heart rate. And we found that there was one particular ride, which was a Gerschlauer ride called a Eurofighter style ride. And there's one called Rage at Southend-on-Sea. And people go, well, how could that be the most thrilling ride in the UK?

23:43It's because of its small footprint and the intensity of those changes. I liken it to the concentrated orange juice of the rollercoaster world. Well, if Brendan reckons it's the concentrated orange juice of the rollercoaster world, I guess I'd better give it a go. So I've come to Adventure Island in Essex in the UK to ride this, a rollercoaster called Rage. and I'm in good company because I'm joined by Phil. Hello, I'm Philip Miller, the owner of Aventure Island. I've been doing this for 50 years and this is actually our golden anniversary. So it's a delight to work with you, Alex. Oh, thank you.

24:24So, Phil, what have we got here? Well, the range we've had here since 2007, I suppose it's our signature ride. It was a big thing at the time. It cost us about£3 million. It stands about 72 foot and its first drop is about 97 degrees drop, which means actually you're dropping steeper than vertical. And it reaches speeds of about 40 odd miles an hour. It's pre-inversions and takes riders upside down three times during the ride. So it's quite unique in its sense because we got it into like a footprint. I think it was just about 60 by 80 or something at the time. We took a few rides out and it's just been wonderful ever since.

25:03And so what is so impressive about it having such a small footprint? You haven't got actually time to think about what's coming next. Of course, it only lasts about a minute. But boy, oh boy, you come off and you think, oh, I haven't been on it for years. Have you not? When was the last time you were on it? I think my daughter was about seven. Can we go on it together? No. Phil might not be joining me today, but that's not going to stop me. Okay, this is good health and safety. I think we're almost ready to go, but I'm starting to feel a little bit nervous, which makes me wonder why I put myself into this situation at all.

25:39Come to think of it, what makes any of us get on a roller coaster in the first place? Rage begins with a 22 metre vertical climb. I'm pointed straight up, and I don't need to be wired up to one of Brendan's gadgets to know that I'm feeling the fear right now. Okay, going around. And we're going up. At the top, the train goes over the edge and drops 97 degrees, meaning the drop is actually steeper than vertical.

26:16Then it whips you into a huge vertical loop. I'm upside down before I can catch my breath. According to Brendan, rides like this have been scientifically engineered to produce the maximum thrill possible. If you think of a roller coaster like a cooking recipe, there are ingredients that we'll be looking for. So there are things that will create changes to your emotional state. For example, changes in G-force. Yeah. Extreme speeds. Woo! You'll have height. I'm shooting straight up. I'm at 90 degrees. Little bunny hops as well, these little slight undulations in the track are known to create pleasure, even though they're not most arousing.

27:04Brendan says that the thrill of the best coasters comes from keeping riders guessing. The more elements a ride has, such as loops and corkscrews, and the more tightly they're packed together, the more thrilling the experience becomes. There's barely any time to anticipate what's coming next, keeping riders constantly on edge. After experiencing rage firsthand, I can testify that it really is the concentrated orange juice of the rollercoaster world. Within three seconds, I'm up to the top of a massive drop. And then my brain has no time to cogitate. Immediately, I'm loop-de-looping. I'm rolling.

27:47I'm going left and right. I don't even have time to process it until I get back here. Okay, that was a laugh. So our evolutionary response to danger might drive us to seek thrills, and ride designers can manipulate the forces acting on our bodies to make those thrills even more potent. But there's another question we haven't answered. why do some of us like myself and gunner love roller coasters while others absolutely hate them back to brendan if we look at another scientist marvin zuckerman he developed the sensation seeking scale turns out that even among thrill seekers we're not all looking for the same kind of sensation there are four categories in the sensation seeking scale there are people who like thrill and adventure.

28:44So these are people who love to go skydiving, love roller coasters. Then there's experience seeking, which is much more related to magic and spectacle, people going to theatre, seeing light shows, fireworks. The third category is for people who are disinhibited. And they're the kind of people who love to perform. So if you're sat next to one on a roller coaster, they'll be screaming their heads off. And that's really important because thrill is infectious. And finally, there's susceptibility to boredom. And so if you're not so susceptible, for example, you know, you don't mind waiting two hours in the queue for a roller coaster, then great.

29:23We all have different personality types. And so we will all respond differently to different forms of thrilling entertainment. There you have it, Gunnar. We're hardwired to enjoy a bit of a thrill, something that gives you a taste of a dangerous situation but pulls back just before you might actually get hurt. I hope you've enjoyed CrowdScience with me, Alex Lathbridge. If you have a question that you'd like us to answer, Gunnar will have the details on how to get in touch in just a moment. But first, a quick aside. CrowdScience is fast approaching its 10th anniversary. To celebrate, we're looking back at some of the most fascinating, curious and funniest moments from the past decade and we want to hear your favourites.

30:11If there's a show that's stuck in your mind, tell us what it was and why you think it deserves a place in our anniversary celebration. Over to Gunnar and his mum Kira to tell you how to get in touch. You have been listening to Crowdsides from the BBC World Service. The presenter was Alex Laithbridge and the producer was Harrison Lewis. The question was from me, Gunnar, in the United States. If you've got a science question you'd like the team to answer, you can email it to crowdscience at bbc.co.uk or send a message or voice note on WhatsApp. The number is plus 44-8000-314-773. That's plus 44-800-314-773.