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April 3 - April 3, 2022
“There were 103 years of flying experience in that cockpit when we faced our end…but not one minute of those 103 years had been spent operating an aircraft the way we were trying to fly it,”
Police officers, like pilots, are sometimes trained to repeatedly scan their horizon to avoid fixation. (Police have also learned to exploit tunnel vision in others by intentionally stepping to the side to get into a suspect’s blind spot.) Just knowing enough to identify certain stress reactions can improve people’s performance. But most regular people don’t know to expect tunnel vision—even
When you talk on your cell phone while driving, your range of sight narrows significantly, according to a 2002 University of Rhode Island study. The distraction is so strong that your case of tunnel vision continues well after the phone conversation has ended. The brain is built to focus on one thing at a time, whether in a traffic jam or during an emergency landing. We have built technology for multitasking, but the brain has not changed.
“Kids remember ‘stop, drop, and roll’ because we make them rehearse it—not because we make them say it,” says Richard Gist, a psychologist who works for the Kansas City, Missouri, Fire Department. The trick is to embed the behavior in the subconscious, so that it is automatic, almost like the rest of the fear response.
Just like a novice cab driver in New York City, the brain starts out slow and inefficient and finds shortcuts as time goes on. This way, we can compensate for our own weaknesses. Even if our fear response is ancient, we can continually upgrade it for modernity.
Today, many police officers are trained to never keep their fingers on their gun triggers. That way, the flinch has fewer consequences.
But it’s the same basic concept taught in yoga and Lamaze classes. One version taught to police works like this: breathe in for four counts; hold for four counts; breathe out for four counts; hold for four; start again.
The breath is one of the few actions that reside in both our somatic nervous system (which we can consciously control) and our autonomic system (which includes our heartbeat and other actions we cannot easily access).
So the breath is a bridge between the two, as combat instructor Dave Grossman explains. By consciously slowing down the breath, we can de-escalate the primal fear response that otherwise takes over.
The meditators had 5 percent thicker brain tissue in the parts of the prefrontal cortex that are engaged during meditation—that is, the parts that handle emotion regulation, attention, and working memory, all of which help control stress.
What’s most interesting is that just knowing they have such powers might be valuable in itself. Laughter, like breathing, reduces our emotional arousal level as well.
It also has the benefit of making us feel more in control of the situation. Again and again, studies have shown that people perform better under stress if they think they can handle
Self-confidence, in other words, can save your life. Says Massad Ayoob, a veteran police officer and instructor: “The single strongest [weapon] is a mental plan of what you’ll do in a certain crisis.
It’s easy to forget that the victims are not the only tremulous people at a crime scene. Fear transforms everyone, from the police officer to the bank robber.
In this situation, he recognized that he had a skill the terrorists needed. In his role on the committee, he became more comfortable. He began to joke with the other hostages and his captors.
When I ask him this question, he says it’s not that he doesn’t feel fear; he does, every time. But a calmness resides just adjacent to the fear. “You have to be very cold-blooded,” he says. But what makes someone “cold-blooded”? Is it genetics? Experience? A chemical imbalance? What makes the difference?
Sex matters too. It is far better to be a man in certain disasters, and a woman in others. Men are more likely to be killed by lightning, hurricanes, and fires. Nearly twice as many men die in fires, according to the U.S. Fire Administration. That’s partly because men tend to do more dangerous jobs. But it’s also because men take more risks overall. They are more likely to walk toward smoke and drive through floods. “Women tend to be more cautious,” says Susan Cutter, director of the Hazards Research Laboratory at the University of South Carolina. “They are not going to put themselves or their
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Maybe women and minorities just have less faith in government authorities. Do they worry more because they don’t trust other people to do it for them? But there again, when the researchers controlled for such attitudes, it didn’t fully explain the worry gap.
small subgroup. As it turns out, about 30 percent of white males see very little risk in most threats. They create much of the gender and race gap all on their own.
The more important factor was how they viewed the world and their place in it.
“It was the shoes.” Many women took off their heels halfway through the evacuation and had to walk home barefoot. Survivors reported tripping over piles of high-heeled shoes in the staircases.
Of all the people who die in fires each year, 25 percent are African American—twice their share of the population. The disparity is most glaring when it comes to children: African American and American Indian children are nearly twice as likely to die in a fire than white or Asian children.
Fires are more likely in places with shoddy construction where people use portable heaters to stay warm and where smoke detectors are absent or not working. In poor neighborhoods, then, fire is part of the hazardscape, says Onieal. “You got addicts on the corner, you got people who steal your lunch money, and you got fires.”
Developed nations experience just as many natural disasters as undeveloped nations. The difference is in the death toll. Of all the people who died from natural disasters on the planet from 1985 to 1999, 65 percent came from nations with incomes below $760 per capita, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Resilience is a precious skill. People who have it tend to also have three underlying advantages: a belief that they can influence life events; a tendency to find meaningful purpose in life’s turmoil; and a conviction that they can learn from both positive and negative experiences. These beliefs act as a sort of buffer, cushioning the blow of any given disaster. Dangers seem more manageable to these people, and they perform better as a result. “Trauma, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder,” says George Everly Jr., at the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health Preparedness in Baltimore,
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One thing that they have in abundance is confidence. As we saw in the chapter on fear, confidence—that comes from realistic rehearsal or even laughter—soothes the more disruptive effects of extreme fear.
Those with high senses of self-worth rebounded relatively easily. They even had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva. Their confidence was like a vaccine against life’s vicissitudes.
that confidence comes from doing. As we saw in Chapter 3, the brain functions much better when it is familiar with a problem. We feel more in control because we are more in control.
What was more surprising was how different the Special Forces soldiers were chemically. When Morgan analyzed their blood samples, he found that the Special Forces soldiers produced significantly more of something called “neuropeptide Y,” a compound that helps you stay focused on a task under stress, among other things.
(In civilian life, people with anxiety disorders or depression tend to have lower levels of neuropeptide Y.) The difference was so marked that Morgan could literally tell whether someone was a member of the Special Forces unit just by looking at their blood results.
“They like the challenge and the thrill but not in a thrill-seeking way. They’re pretty quiet and meticulous and focused as a group,” Morgan says. “If you’ve ever seen that movie Black Hawk Down, it really does portray Green Berets accurately. They really are different kinds of animals.”
It turned out a simple questionnaire could predict who would produce more neuropeptide Y.
Strangely, Special Forces soldiers also reported more trauma in their backgrounds overall.
In the mid-1990s, scientists discovered that people with posttraumatic stress disorder didn’t just behave
(London cab drivers, who must memorize all the city’s streets, have unusually large hippocampi.) Most
In other words, the brain of the nonveteran twin provided a snapshot of the brain of the veteran before he went to war.
In other words, a smaller hippocampus seemed to predate the trauma. Certain people were at higher risk of developing posttraumatic stress disorder before they even left for Vietnam. We can deduce, then, that certain people will likely have a harder time processing fear in a disaster—and recovering from that trauma later.
The amount of trauma, the degree of family support for the victim—all of these things can massively compound or contain the damage. Suffering accumulates, like debt.
Gilbertson suspects that a smaller hippocampus might actually help some people in a life-or-death situation—by making them hypervigilant, for example, and less prone to waste time in denial. It’s easy to imagine how a smaller hippocampus might have been an evolutionary advantage in some situations, and a handicap in others.
The test was forcing me to use my hippocampus to orient myself with my short-term memory and contextual cues. The
After six hours, I was wrecked. My brain was clearly not used to this kind of exercise. I don’t even like crossword puzzles.
His hippocampus was not reliably making sense of where he was and where he needed to go.
As for the other tests, my level of overall cognitive functioning ranked in the ninety-fifth percentile for the general population in my age group. That is also a good predictor of resilience. My concentration and memory scores were also very high, even though it hardly seems obvious to me in real life. Both skills also correlate with resilience.
have yet to meet anyone who made it out of the World Trade Center on 9/11 without having memorable interactions with at least one other person. Which parts of their brains lit up when they had those conversations? How did their behavior change after they exchanged bits of information and helped each other up off the ground? Disasters, by definition, do not happen to individuals. The only way to fully understand our behavior, then, is to look around at the people beside us.
Their individual profiles mattered, but the group, and the parts they played in it, mattered just as much.
People move in groups whenever they can. They are usually far more polite than they are normally. They look out for one another, and they maintain hierarchies. “People die the same way they live,” notes disaster sociologist Lee Clarke, “with friends, loved ones, and colleagues, in communities.”
When people are told to leave in anticipation of a hurricane or flood, most check with four or more sources—family, newscasters, and officials, among others—before deciding what to do, according to a study by sociologist Thomas Drabek. That process of checking in, or milling, sets the tone for the rest of the evacuation. Who you’re with matters a great deal.
But it turned out that the disaster itself created an instant bond between people. “Even if they started out quite fragmented, they came together and showed an enormous amount of solidarity,” Drury says.
Like the office workers in the World Trade Center on 9/11, she followed the preexisting chain of command. As word of the fire slowly spread, people reacted like actors in play, each according to role.
But later investigations would show that the vast majority of people were well behaved. In fact, children, wives, and the elderly were among the most likely to survive.
