Whenever the subject of “amazing abilities of normal folk” comes up, you hear about the mother/grandmother who lifts a car off of her child. Has this type of thing really happened? If so, does it mean that anytime I (or anyone) get really angry or afraid we could just Hulk out? You’d think if the effects were that spectacular the military would have devised some sort of instant injection that would mimic the effects. (Cue X-Files music).
Adrenaline doesn’t make you “Hulk out”. It just quickly mobilizes your metabolism to maximize physical effort for a minute or two at most. It won’t help you do any physical feat you’re not inherently capable of doing otherwise.
QtM, MD
Adrenaline (epinephrine) has widespread effects on circulation, the muscles, and sugar metabolism. The action of the heart is increased, the rate and depth of breathing are increased and the metabolic rate is raised; the force of muscular contraction improves (hence the “superhuman” displays of strength we hear about) and the onset of muscular fatigue is delayed. Basically, your body is working at an incredible optimum, so even though you shouldn’t turn into the Hulk, you certainly could be capable of great feats that under normal circumstances, would not be possible.
Doesn’t adrenaline stimulate the release of stored energy in the muscles? I think I heard that somewhere.
For me, it just makes my right leg twitch uncontrollably (restless leg syndrome?)
I think adrenaline also heightens your senses.
An example of a situation where this has happened to me: I’ve been alone in the house at night and I’ve heard a noise downstairs. The adrenaline kicked in, my sleepiness dropped away almost instantly, and I could actually feel my heartbeat increase in my chest.
I also seemed to have sharper hearing, as if it was my body’s way of being on “red alart” for a possible attack.
Of course it turned out to be the cat, but the example still serves to make the point.
It dilates your pupils, too.
I think most of the stories are UL.
Peace,
mangeorge
Come to think of it, I don’t believe I’ve ever actually heard one of those stories. I only hear about them, as in, “You know those stories you hear about the mother who lifts a car to save her child…”
More than likely it happened one time, the lady ruined her spine, damaged muscles and tore ligaments, and was in a hospital for months. After that it became “you always hear of women…”.
For some reason when something happens once, it gets turned into a regular occurance. LOL
I don’t know how strong you can get but under the influence of adrenaline I did something there was not way I could normally do. When I was about 65 years old I was walking my dog out on the desert early one morning. I stopped to watch the dog dive into a greasewood bush after something, glanced down and saw a coiled up rattlesnake right by my ankle. Instantly, and I mean instantly, I was about 6 ft away looking back at the snake. It was as if I had been shoved into a matter transporter that sent things off at the speed of light. That adrenaline is wonderful stuff.
Fortunately it had been a cold night and the snake was sluggish or even adrenaline wouldn’t have done the job. Of course an alert snake wouldn’t have let me get that close either.
I damn near stepped on a sleeping and coiled big rattler once when I was a kid. I got back to camp and the rest of my Dad’s geology class was gathered around a little rattler hissing at them. They weren’t interested in my story. I wasn’t interested in theirs.
David Simmons recalls;
Adrenaline also distort’s one’s sense of time. 
Peace,
mangeorge
Oh sure, that was just hyperbole. I suspect that what happened was that I simply didn’t register any outside stimuli during that time. And I’m quite sure that my muscles were always capable of doing that. It’s just that I hadn’t used them that way in a long time and also don’t have the ability to get all my reactions, heart rate, blood pressure etc. up to the task of using that capability on demand. If I could I might have been an olympic athlete.
Well, I don’t know about superhuman feats of strenghhj, but I do not that I’m absolutely worthless as a wrestler until I get angry.
My strength roughly triples and I don’t seem to miss any moves when I am pissed off at my opponent.
Of course 
now I’ve given up team sports to be a musician anyway…
David, I live for hyperbole.
{slight hijack} What about the story in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas about adenochrome(sp?)?
Scary-sounding stuff…
What they usually don’t mention in those stories of Amazing Feats Under the Influence of Adrenalin is that while doing said feats you can cause great bodily harm (broken bones, torn ligaments, etc.) which then take months to recover from, if not surgery.
Adrenalin puts the whole body into crisis mode. Which is fine if you’re escaping from lions and tiger and bears (oh my!) or a burning building or out from under a debris pile. But you can’t exist in that mode for any prolonged period of time, you’d wear out your body.
I would think that a “hulk-out” injection would run the risk of not only heart attack or stroke from elevated blood pressure and heart beat (both of which can jump quite high in a crisis), but highly sustained phsycial effort could actually destroy muscle cells, the parts of which can get into your bloodstream and clog up your kidneys. Your body just isn’t designed to run at full steam for any length of time.
“adrenochrome” as presented in the book is a myth. It is an easily obtained, though unstable chemical with very small if any psycotropic activity. I am not sure why Thompson fell for it.
For nature’s own experiment with adrenaline excess, read up onpheochromocytoma. This is a tumor of the adrenal medulla that elaborates lots of adrenaline (to be fair, many of them secrete noradrenaline as well). Affected individuals have extremely high blood pressure spikes, headaches, jitteryness, and sweating. No mention of super human strength in the clinical literature, though.
I’m with Mangeorge on the UL theory for the amazing feats of human strength stuff. In any case, the stress response is vastly more complex than a single hormone.
…Does an “Adrenaline Rush” have any effect on the human pain threshold? That might for instances of seemingly super-human strength. (A la PCPs)
I don’t know if it’s adrenalin or if the human body releases its natural opiates under extreme stress (as someone pointed out, more than one chemical is involved), but in “crisis mode” the pain threshold tends to go way up, to the point that people can be severely hurt and not realize it until after the fact.
I don’t think the “superhuman strength” stories are all urban legend (although some are no doubt exaggerated). In part, it’s a matter than people are often stronger than they are assumed to be, and if you’re in a situation where you are not considering damage to your own self (as where a parent is trying to save a child’s life) you won’t hold back with thoughts of “oh, I might hurt my back”.
I routinely shove objects weighing ten times what I do around an airport ramp (yes, these objects have wheels, which helps considerably). Given that I’m not a particularly strong woman, it doesn’t seem at all improbable that a randomly chosen woman, desperate to save an injured child, could shove or even partially lift part of a compact car weighing about the same off said child. She’s not bench-pressing the vehicle, but she is moving it. After all, these stories seldom say how big the car is,