Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

by Laurence Gonzales

The farther one goes The less one knows. —Tao Te Ching

Under extreme stress, the visual field actually narrows. (Police officers who have been shot report tunnel vision.) Stress causes most people to focus narrowly on the thing that they consider most important, and it may be the wrong thing.

Emotions are survival mechanisms, but they don’t always work for the individual. They work across a large number of trials to keep the species alive. The individual may live or die, but over a few million years, more mammals lived than died by letting emotion take over, and so emotion was selected.

The most remarkable discovery of modern neuroscience is that the body controls the brain as much as the brain controls the body.

When a decision to act must be made instantly, it is made through a system of emotional bookmarks. The emotional system reacts to circumstances, finds bookmarks that flag similar experiences in your past and your response to them, and allows you to recall the feelings, good or bad, of the outcomes of your actions.

Those gut feelings give you an instant reading on how to behave. If a previous experience was bad, you avoid that option. When it was good, “it becomes a beacon of incentive,” to use Damasio’s words.

Those who avoid accidents are those who see the world clearly, see it changing, and change their behavior accordingly.

“There are old pilots and bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots.”

D. H. Lawrence wrote that every year you pass an anniversary unaware: the anniversary of your own death.